As in #903 for the PDF backend, which is now fixed, the FreeSans '0' and '8' characters are distorted when saving to .svg:

plot(np.arange(10))
gcf().savefig('freesans_example.png')
gcf().savefig('freesans_example.svg')

The resulting files:

http://devio.us/~mspacek/freesans_example.png
http://devio.us/~mspacek/freesans_example.svg

This is with svg.fonttype set to the default 'path'. If set to 'svgfont' or 'none' instead, the problem seems to go away.