render-tag

render-tag

Render HTML rich text onto canvas with the 2D API. No SVG, no foreignObject — just fillText, measureText, and drawing primitives. Significantly faster than SVG-based approaches; synchronous; zero dependencies.

Website & demos: https://polotno.com/render-tag/

By design, render-tag focuses on rich text only — paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, inline formatting. Not interactive elements or arbitrary HTML layouts.

Install

npm install render-tag

Usage

import { render } from 'render-tag';

const { canvas, height } = render({
  html: `
    <style>.title { font: 24px Georgia, serif; color: #1a1a1a; }</style>
    <p class="title">Hello <strong>world</strong></p>
  `,
  width: 400,
});

document.body.appendChild(canvas);

render is synchronous — load fonts before calling (e.g. await document.fonts.load('400 16px "Roboto"')). If a font isn't loaded yet, the browser falls back to a default and text metrics will be wrong. Re-render once fonts arrive.

API

function render(config: RenderConfig): { canvas, height, layoutRoot, lines };
function layout(config: LayoutConfig): { layoutRoot, height, lines };
function drawLayout(config: DrawConfig): { canvas };

Option	Default	Notes
html	required	HTML string (include <style> tags for CSS).
width	required	Layout width in CSS pixels.
height	auto	Fixed height; auto-sized from content if omitted.
canvas	created	Existing target canvas (mutually exclusive with ctx).
ctx	—	Existing 2D context — no canvas resizing or scaling.
pixelRatio	devicePixelRatio	HiDPI scaling.
accuracy	'performance'	'balanced' uses DOM probes for per-browser line-height accuracy; 'performance' is pure canvas and consistent cross-browser.

Use layout() + drawLayout() when you need to measure content, render the same layout onto multiple targets, or render onto an OffscreenCanvas.

LayoutLine

Each entry in result.lines:

interface LayoutLine {
  y: number;        // baseline y
  text: string;
  bounds: { x, y, width, height };  // DOMRect-shaped line box
}

bounds is a drop-in replacement for Range.getClientRects() per line — useful for per-line backgrounds, hit-testing, or highlighting.

Multi-line ellipsis (-webkit-line-clamp)

.caption { width: 240px; -webkit-line-clamp: 3; }

Clips to N lines and appends an ellipsis to the Nth. line-clamp (unprefixed) is accepted as a synonym. none / auto / 0 mean "no clamp". Like Chrome's legacy -webkit-box behavior, the line count spans block descendants — a clamp on a wrapper truncates across its <p>/<div> children and drops everything below the cut.

Text on path: render-tag/path

Draw rich text along an SVG path. Separate subpath entry point.

import { drawTextOnPath } from 'render-tag/path';

drawTextOnPath({
  html: '<span style="font:24px sans-serif">Hello <b>world</b></span>',
  path: 'M20,150 Q200,20 380,150',  // SVG `d` string, or a PathLike
  ctx,
  align: 'center',          // 'left' | 'center' | 'right' | 'justify' (default 'left')
  textBaseline: 'middle',   // path = vertical center of text (default 'alphabetic')
});

textBaseline controls where the path runs relative to the text: 'alphabetic' (default) — path = baseline, descenders below. 'middle' — path through the vertical center. 'top' / 'bottom' — text hangs below / above the path.

Same HTML/CSS dialect as the main API: fonts, colors, weights, direction: rtl, text-shadow, background-color, text-decoration, gradient text via background-clip: text. Joining scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, Thai, Khmer, Myanmar) are shaped as runs so cursive joining works.

The path lays out as a single logical line — glyphs that overflow the path's end are dropped.

Returns { glyphs, textWidth, pathLength, lineHeight, bounds }. Each GlyphPlacement has { char, x, y, rotation, width, style, ascent, descent, pathOffset, shaped }.

bounds is a DOMRect-shaped { x, y, width, height } describing the visible area of the rendered curved text — the union of per-glyph cells. Use it to size a parent UI element without re-walking the glyphs. The library does not consume bounds internally; it's purely for consumers.

Layout once, draw many

import { layoutTextOnPath, drawTextOnPathLayout } from 'render-tag/path';

const result = layoutTextOnPath({ html, path, align: 'center' });
drawTextOnPathLayout({ layout: result, ctx: canvas1.getContext('2d')! });
drawTextOnPathLayout({ layout: result, ctx: canvas2.getContext('2d')! });

Not supported: full mixed-script BiDi shaping (pure-RTL via direction: rtl works).

Node.js / server-side

render-tag stays zero-dependency, so nothing works out of the box in Node — inject a DOM parser (linkedom, jsdom, …) and pass a measurement 2D context. Nothing is ever written to globalThis.

import { layout, drawLayout, setDOMParser } from 'render-tag';
import { DOMParser } from 'linkedom';
import { createCanvas } from 'canvas';

setDOMParser(new DOMParser()); // once

const ctx = createCanvas(1, 1).getContext('2d');
const result = layout({ html, width: 400, ctx }); // ctx is required on Node
drawLayout({ layout: result, width: 400, ctx: outputCtx });

Without injection, functions throw with guidance. accuracy: 'balanced' needs a real browser DOM and throws on Node — use the default 'performance'. render-tag/path works the same way (layoutTextOnPath already takes ctx; it re-exports setDOMParser).

What it renders

Paragraphs, headings, divs, spans · bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, overline · colors, background colors, text-shadow, text-stroke (solid and gradient), gradient text · font families, sizes, weights (100–900) · line-height, letter-spacing, text-align (left/center/right/justify) · ordered/unordered lists with nesting · flexbox (row/column), basic tables · -webkit-line-clamp · pre-wrap, overflow-wrap: break-word, soft hyphens · RTL, CJK, emoji.

render-tag-specific inputs

render-tag renders plain HTML/CSS — no custom syntax required. The exception: a couple of properties that have no real CSS equivalent for canvas text, so render-tag reads them off the element's style as an extra channel. They are inert in a real browser (a browser ignores or drops them), so the same HTML still renders in the DOM — render-tag just paints a little extra.

Property	Type	Effect
--rt-text-stroke-image	CSS custom property, a linear-gradient(...)	Paints the -webkit-text-stroke outline with a gradient instead of a solid color.
stroke-linejoin	round (default) | miter | bevel	Corner join for -webkit-text-stroke (SVG-style; HTML text-stroke has no join control).

Gradient text stroke

CSS can only give a text stroke a solid color (-webkit-text-stroke: 4px #333), and there is no CSS way to paint the outline with a gradient — the DOM work-around is a two-layer background-clip: text stack. On canvas a gradient stroke is trivial (ctx.strokeStyle = gradient), so render-tag exposes it directly. Set the normal stroke for width + a solid fallback color, then hand render-tag the gradient via --rt-text-stroke-image:

<div style="
  color: #fff;                                     /* fill */
  -webkit-text-stroke: 4px #000;                   /* width + solid fallback */
  --rt-text-stroke-image: linear-gradient(0deg, #000 0%, #d400ff 100%);
  paint-order: stroke fill;                         /* stroke under the fill */
">Outlined</div>

The gradient spans the declaring element (like a background-clip: text fill gradient) and threads through block children (<p>, <li>), so wrapped lines and list items share one continuous stroke gradient. A custom property is used because a browser strips unknown real properties from inline cssText before render-tag can read them — custom properties survive.

Recommended CSS reset

For tighter DOM/canvas parity, drop these into your input HTML:

/* Chrome shrinks <code>/<pre> font-size via a UA quirk; canvas can't replicate it. */
code, pre, kbd, samp { font-size: inherit; }

/* Firefox's ::marker adds ~1.5px per <li>; render-tag draws markers itself. */
li::marker { content: none; font-size: 0; line-height: 0; }

/* Firefox's canvas kerning drifts on emoji; disable it on emoji-bearing text. */
.has-emoji { font-kerning: none; }

How it works

1. Parse HTML with DOMParser.
2. Resolve styles with a built-in CSS parser (selectors, specificity, cascade, inheritance — no DOM insertion).
3. Lay out with canvas measureText (block flow, inline wrapping, margin collapsing).
4. Render with the canvas 2D API (fillText, fillRect, strokeText, …).

Design decisions

• Chrome-first. When a rendering choice must favor one browser over another, Chrome wins.
• Cross-browser consistency over per-browser DOM fidelity. Same canvas output in every browser, not pixel-matching each browser's quirks. Use accuracy: 'balanced' if you'd rather match each browser's own DOM rendering.

License

MIT