This was an six hour research project! There were examples that used Inkscape or ImageMagick or some similar external program that needed to be loaded on your server and use a command-line interface to work. This seemed overly messy and resource intensive. One such example is here -
http://www.kendoui.com/code-library/dataviz/chart/kendo-ui-chart-export.aspx
But there HAD to be a more direct .NET route. Then I stumbled upon this -
http://svg.codeplex.com/ and in 6 lines of code (it should have been less) the solution worked!
Simply download the dll from the website above and use code similar to:
Dim strSVG As String = "YOUR SVG STRING OUTPUT"
strSVG = strSVG.Replace("style='font: 12px Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif'", "font-family='Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif' font-size='12'")
strSVG = strSVG.Replace("style='font: 16px Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif'", "font-family='Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif' font-size='16'")
Dim stream = New System.IO.MemoryStream(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(strSVG))
Dim svg = SvgDocument.Open(stream)
svg.Draw().Save("YOUR FILE LOCATION", System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png)
Change the "System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat" to whatever you would like.
At the end you don't have to save it to a file, you can save it to a stream and post it back as the response as part of a "download chart" submission.
It would have been much easier but the control was struggling with the "style=" syntax in the SVG and it wouldn't save any of the text to the image. Hence the reason for the "Replace" lines - which took additional time to troubleshoot.
According to the powers that be at that site:
"
It appears to be that the library doesn't support the 'complex' font syntax in the style attribute. I can't work out why, because the standard FontConverter class should support that syntax (or at least similar ones). "
But the workaround wasn't that hard. I suppose if you change the default formatting for any of the labels or titles in the chart, you will need to adjust your "replace" lines.
Hope this saves someone many hours!
Shawn