How to resize html canvas element?

Question

I have a canvas element defined statically in the html with a width and height. If I attempt to use JavaScript to resize it dynamically (setting a new width and height - eit

Answer 1

<div id="canvasdiv" style="margin: 5px; height: 100%; width: 100%;">
    <canvas id="mycanvas" style="border: 1px solid red;"></canvas>
</div>
<script>
$(function(){
    InitContext();
});
function InitContext()
{
var $canvasDiv = $('#canvasdiv');

var canvas = document.getElementById("mycanvas");
canvas.height = $canvasDiv.innerHeight();
canvas.width = $canvasDiv.innerWidth();
}
</script>

Answer 2

You didn't publish your code, and I suspect you do something wrong. it is possible to change the size by assigning width and height attributes using numbers:

canvasNode.width  = 200; // in pixels
canvasNode.height = 100; // in pixels

At least it works for me. Make sure you don't assign strings (e.g., "2cm", "3in", or "2.5px"), and don't mess with styles.

Actually this is a publicly available knowledge — you can read all about it in the HTML canvas spec — it is very small and unusually informative. This is the whole DOM interface:

interface HTMLCanvasElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute unsigned long width;
           attribute unsigned long height;

  DOMString toDataURL();
  DOMString toDataURL(in DOMString type, [Variadic] in any args);

  DOMObject getContext(in DOMString contextId);
};

As you can see it defines 2 attributes width and height, and both of them are unsigned long.

Answer 3

Prototypes can be a hassle to work with, and from the _PROTO part of the error it appears your error is caused by, say, HTMLCanvasElement.prototype.width, possibly as an attempt to resize all the canvases at once.

As a suggestion, if you are trying to resize a number of canvases at once, you could try:

<canvas></canvas>
<canvas></canvas>
<canvas></canvas>
<script type="text/javascript">
    ...
</script>

In the JavaScript, instead of invoking a prototype, try this:

$$ = function(){
    return document.querySelectorAll.apply(document,arguments);
}
for(var i in $$('canvas')){
    canvas = $$('canvas')[i];
    canvas.width = canvas.width+100;
    canvas.height = canvas.height+100;
}

This would resize all the canvases by adding 100 px to their size, as is demonstrated in this example

---

Hope this helped.

Answer 4

Note that if your canvas is statically declared you should use the width and height attributes, not the style, eg. this will work:

<canvas id="c" height="100" width="100" style="border:1px"></canvas>
<script>
    document.getElementById('c').width = 200;
</script>

But this will not work:

<canvas id="c" style="width: 100px; height: 100px; border:1px"></canvas>
<script>
    document.getElementById('c').width = 200;
</script>

Answer 5

I just had the same problem as you, but found out about the toDataURL method, which proved useful.

The gist of it is to turn your current canvas into a dataURL, change your canvas size, and then draw what you had back into your canvas from the dataURL you saved.

So here's my code:

var oldCanvas = canvas.toDataURL("image/png");
var img = new Image();
img.src = oldCanvas;
img.onload = function (){
    canvas.height += 100;
    ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0);
}

Answer 6

This worked for me just now:

<canvas id="c" height="100" width="100" style="border:1px solid red"></canvas>
<script>
var c = document.getElementById('c');
alert(c.height + ' ' + c.width);
c.height = 200;
c.width = 200;
alert(c.height + ' ' + c.width);
</script>