So when you export an Adobe Illustrator file to SVG format, paths are encoded using the SVG path syntax.
If you look at the
<path data> element, it's possible to have
moveto commands embedded into a path.
In other words, you draw a few lines in the path, pick up the pen and move it somewhere else, and continue the same path.
I have been trying to figure out how to do this in Illustrator to no avail. You can add on to an existing path but it seems you can only do this by extending the path from one of the endpoints. I don't want to do this: I want to continue the path from somewhere else.
You can get something sort of like this by grouping two disjoint paths. However when Illustrator does the svg export it just creates two
<path> tags and puts them inside a
<g> tag which is not what I want. If I manually edit an svg file with a text editor, adding "move to" commands, and I import them, it looks like maybe what Illustrator is doing is creating a group, but I can't tell because I don't know how to select and object and figure out if it is a group or not.