How can I convert an HTML element to a canvas element?

Question

There is a library that try to do what you say.

See this examples and get the code

http://hertzen.com/experiments/jsfeedback/

http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/

Reads the DOM, from the html and render it to a canvas, fail on some, but in general works.

Sorry, the browser won't render HTML into a canvas.

It would be a potential security risk if you could, as HTML can include content (in particular images and iframes) from third-party sites. If canvas could turn HTML content into an image and then you read the image data, you could potentially extract privileged content from other sites.

To get a canvas from HTML, you'd have to basically write your own HTML renderer from scratch using drawImage and fillText, which is a potentially huge task. There's one such attempt here but it's a bit dodgy and a long way from complete. (It even attempts to parse the HTML/CSS from scratch, which I think is crazy! It'd be easier to start from a real DOM node with styles applied, and read the styling using getComputedStyle and relative positions of parts of it using offsetTop et al.)

Take a look at this tutorial on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Canvas/Drawing_DOM_objects_into_a_canvas (archived)

Its key trick was:

var canvas = document.getElementById('canvas');
var ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');

var data = '<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="200" height="200">' +
           '<foreignObject width="100%" height="100%">' +
           '<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" style="font-size:40px">' +
             '<em>I</em> like ' + 
             '<span style="color:white; text-shadow:0 0 2px blue;">' +
             'cheese</span>' +
           '</div>' +
           '</foreignObject>' +
           '</svg>';

var DOMURL = window.URL || window.webkitURL || window;

var img = new Image();
var svg = new Blob([data], {type: 'image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8'});
var url = DOMURL.createObjectURL(svg);

img.onload = function () {
  ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0);
  DOMURL.revokeObjectURL(url);
}

img.src = url;

That is, it used a temporary SVG image to include the HTML content as a "foreign element", then renders said SVG image into a canvas element. There are significant restrictions on what you can include in an SVG image in this way, however. (See the "Security" section for details — basically it's a lot more limited than an iframe or AJAX due to privacy and cross-domain concerns.)

Building on top of the Mozdev post that natevw references I've started a small project to render HTML to canvas in Firefox, Chrome & Safari. So for example you can simply do:

rasterizeHTML.drawHTML('<span class="color: green">This is HTML</span>' 
                     + '<img src="local_img.png"/>', canvas);

Source code and a more extensive example is here.

You can use dom-to-image library (I'm the maintainer).
Here's how you could approach your problem:

var parent = document.getElementById('my-node-parent');
var node = document.getElementById('my-node');

var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
canvas.width = node.scrollWidth;
canvas.height = node.scrollHeight;

domtoimage.toPng(node).then(function (pngDataUrl) {
    var img = new Image();
    img.onload = function () {
        var context = canvas.getContext('2d');

        context.translate(canvas.width, 0);
        context.scale(-1, 1);
        context.drawImage(img, 0, 0);

        parent.removeChild(node);
        parent.appendChild(canvas);
    };

    img.src = pngDataUrl;
});

And here is jsfiddle

No such thing, sorry.

Though the spec states:

A future version of the 2D context API may provide a way to render fragments of documents, rendered using CSS, straight to the canvas.

Which may be as close as you'll get.

A lot of people want a ctx.drawArbitraryHTML/Element kind of deal but there's nothing built in like that.

The only exception is Mozilla's exclusive drawWindow, which draws a snapshot of the contents of a DOM window into the canvas. This feature is only available for code running with Chrome ("local only") privileges. It is not allowed in normal HTML pages. So you can use it for writing FireFox extensions like this one does but that's it.

You could spare yourself the transformations, you could use CSS3 Transitions to flip <div>'s and <ol>'s and any HTML tag you want. Here are some demos with source code explain to see and learn: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/47-amazing-css3-animation-demos/