CLASS 12 READING NOTES
CHARTS
Charts are far better for displaying data visually than tables and have the added benefit that no one is ever going to press-gang them into use as a layout tool. They’re easier to look at and convey data quickly, but they’re not always easy to create.
A great way to get started with charts is with ‘Chart.js’, a JavaScript plugin that uses HTML5’s canvas element to draw the graph onto the page. It’s a well documented plugin that makes using all kinds of bar charts, line charts, pie charts and more, incredibly easy.
The (Canvas) Element
canvas id="tutorial" width="150" height="150"></canvas
At first sight a canvas looks like the img element, with the only clear difference being that it doesn’t have the src and alt attributes. Indeed, the canvas element has only two attributes, width and height. These are both optional and can also be set using DOM properties. When no width and height attributes are specified, the canvas will initially be 300 pixels wide and 150 pixels high. The element can be sized arbitrarily by CSS, but during rendering the image is scaled to fit its layout size: if the CSS sizing doesn’t respect the ratio of the initial canvas, it will appear distorted.
The rendering context
The canvas element creates a fixed-size drawing surface that exposes one or more rendering contexts, which are used to create and manipulate the content shown. In this tutorial, we focus on the 2D rendering context. Other contexts may provide different types of rendering; for example, WebGL uses a 3D context based on OpenGL ES.
Checking for support
The fallback content is displayed in browsers which do not support canvas. Scripts can also check for support programmatically by simply testing for the presence of the getContext() method.
The Grid
Before we can start drawing, we need to talk about the canvas grid or coordinate space. Our HTML skeleton from the previous page had a canvas element 150 pixels wide and 150 pixels high. To the right, you see this canvas with the default grid overlayed. Normally 1 unit in the grid corresponds to 1 pixel on the canvas. The origin of this grid is positioned in the top left corner at coordinate (0,0). All elements are placed relative to this origin. So the position of the top left corner of the blue square becomes x pixels from the left and y pixels from the top, at coordinate (x,y). Later in this tutorial we’ll see how we can translate the origin to a different position, rotate the grid and even scale it, but for now we’ll stick to the default.
Drawing rectangles
Unlike SVG, canvas only supports two primitive shapes: rectangles and paths (lists of points connected by lines). All other shapes must be created by combining one or more paths. Luckily, we have an assortment of path drawing functions which make it possible to compose very complex shapes.
Drawing paths
Now let’s look at paths. A path is a list of points, connected by segments of lines that can be of different shapes, curved or not, of different width and of different color. A path, or even a subpath, can be closed.
Rectangles
In addition to the three methods we saw in Drawing rectangles, which draw rectangular shapes directly to the canvas, there’s also the rect() method, which adds a rectangular path to a currently open path.
Making Combinations
So far, each example on this page has used only one type of path function per shape. However, there’s no limitation to the number or types of paths you can use to create a shape. So in this final example, let’s combine all of the path functions to make a set of very famous game characters.
Linejoin
The lineJoin property determines how two connecting segments (of lines, arcs or curves) with non-zero lengths in a shape are joined together (degenerate segments with zero lengths, whose specified endpoints and control points are exactly at the same position, are skipped).
There are three possible values for this property: round, bevel and miter. By default this property is set to miter. Note that the lineJoin setting has no effect if the two connected segments have the same direction, because no joining area will be added in this case.