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

It would be incredibly useful to be able to temporarily convert a regular element into a canvas. For example, say I have a styled div that I want to flip. I want to dynamically create a canvas, "render" the HTMLElement into the canvas, hide the original element and animate the canvas.

Can it be done?

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.

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.)

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.)

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/

the next code can be used in 2 modes, mode 1 save the html code to a image, mode 2 save the html code to a canvas.

this code work with the library: https://github.com/tsayen/dom-to-image

*the "id_div" is the id of the element html that you want to transform.

**the "canvas_out" is the id of the div that will contain the canvas so try this code. :

   function Guardardiv(id_div){

      var mode = 2 // default 1 (save to image), mode 2 = save to canvas
      console.log("Process start");
      var node = document.getElementById(id_div);
      // get the div that will contain the canvas
      var canvas_out = document.getElementById('canvas_out');
      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.drawImage(img, 0, 0);
        };
        
        if (mode == 1){ // save to image
             downloadURI(pngDataUrl, "salida.png");
        }else if (mode == 2){ // save to canvas
          img.src = pngDataUrl;
          canvas_out.appendChild(img);
            
        }
      console.log("Process finish");
    });

    }

so, if you want to save to image just add this function:

    function downloadURI(uri, name) {
        var link = document.createElement("a");

        link.download = name;
        link.href = uri;
        document.body.appendChild(link);
        link.click();   
    }

Example of use:

 <html>
 <head>
 </script src="/dom-to-image.js"></script>
 </head> 
 <body>
 <div id="container">
   All content that want to transform
  </div>
  <button onclick="Guardardiv('container');">Convert<button> 

 <!-- if use mode 2 -->
 <div id="canvas_out"></div>
 </html>

Comment if that work. Comenten si les sirvio :)

The easiest solution to animate the DOM elements is using CSS transitions/animations but I think you already know that and you try to use canvas to do stuff CSS doesn't let you to do. What about CSS custom filters? you can transform your elements in any imaginable way if you know how to write shaders. Some other link and don't forget to check the CSS filter lab.
Note: As you can probably imagine browser support is bad.

function convert() {
					dom = document.getElementById('divname');
					var script,
					$this = this,
					options = this.options,
					runH2c = function(){
						try {
							var canvas =     window.html2canvas([ document.getElementById('divname') ], {
								onrendered: function( canvas ) {

								window.open(canvas.toDataURL());
								
								}
							});
						} catch( e ) {
							$this.h2cDone = true;
							log("Error in html2canvas: " + e.message);
						}
					};

					if ( window.html2canvas === undefined && script === undefined ) {
					} else {.
						// html2canvas already loaded, just run it then
						runH2c();
					}
				}