Book Image

HTML5 Canvas Cookbook

By : Eric Rowell
Book Image

HTML5 Canvas Cookbook

By: Eric Rowell

Overview of this book

The HTML5 canvas is revolutionizing graphics and visualizations on the Web. Powered by JavaScript, the HTML5 Canvas API enables web developers to create visualizations and animations right in the browser without Flash. Although the HTML5 Canvas is quickly becoming the standard for online graphics and interactivity, many developers fail to exercise all of the features that this powerful technology has to offer.The HTML5 Canvas Cookbook begins by covering the basics of the HTML5 Canvas API and then progresses by providing advanced techniques for handling features not directly supported by the API such as animation and canvas interactivity. It winds up by providing detailed templates for a few of the most common HTML5 canvas applications—data visualization, game development, and 3D modeling. It will acquaint you with interesting topics such as fractals, animation, physics, color models, and matrix mathematics. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of the HTML5 Canvas API and a toolbox of techniques for creating any type of HTML5 Canvas application, limited only by the extent of your imagination.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
HTML5 Canvas Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Canvas Security
Index

Saving a canvas drawing as an image


In addition to saving the canvas drawing in local storage or in an offline database, we can also use an image data URL to save the canvas drawing as an image so that a user can then save it to their local computer. In this recipe, we'll get the image data URL of the canvas drawing and then set it to the source of an image object so that a user can right click and download the image as a PNG.

Follow these steps to save a canvas drawing as an image:

How to do it...

  1. Define the canvas context and draw a cloud shape:

    window.onload = function(){
        var canvas = document.getElementById("myCanvas");
        var context = canvas.getContext("2d");
        
        // draw cloud
        context.beginPath(); // begin custom shape
        context.moveTo(170, 80);
        context.bezierCurveTo(130, 100, 130, 150, 230, 150);
        context.bezierCurveTo(250, 180, 320, 180, 340, 150);
        context.bezierCurveTo(420, 150, 420, 120, 390, 100);
        context.bezierCurveTo(430, 40, 370, 30, 340, 50);
      ...