Chapter 3. Text

Nearly every Canvas-based application deals with text. Some applications merely configure and display text, whereas other applications provide sophisticated text editing support.

The canvas element only minimally supports text; at the time this book was written, it does not offer many of the features that you will find in basic text editors, features such as text selection, copy and paste, and text scrolling. However, it does support basic necessities such as stroking and filling text, placing text within the canvas, and measuring the width, in pixels, of an arbitrary string. The Canvas context provides three methods pertaining to text:

• strokeText(text, x, y)

• fillText(text, x, y)

• measureText(text)

The measureText() method returns an object with a width property, which represents the width of the text you pass to the method. Three Canvas context properties are related to text: