How do I style HTML5 canvas text to be bold and/or italic?

Question

I'm printing text to a canvas in a pretty straight forward way:

var ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');
ctx.font = "10pt Courier";
ctx.fillText("Hello World", 100, 100);

But how can I change the text to bold, italic or both? Any suggestions to fix that simple example?

Answer 1

You can use any of these:

ctx.font = "italic 10pt Courier";

ctx.font = "bold 10pt Courier";

ctx.font = "italic bold 10pt Courier";

For further information, here are a couple of resources:

• Dive into HTML5
• How to display text in canvas
• HTML5 canvas - the basics

Answer 2

Just an additional heads up for anyone who stumbles across this: be sure to follow the order shown in the accepted answer.

I ran into some cross-browser issues when I had the wrong order. Having "10px Verdana bold" works in Chrome, but not in IE or Firefox. Switching it to "bold 10px Verdana" as indicated fixed those problems. Double-check the order if you run into similar problems.

Answer 3

Underline is not possible through any of the canvas methods or properties. But I did some work around to get it done. You can check it out @ http://scriptstock.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/html5-canvas-text-underline-workaround

You can find the implementation here http://jsfiddle.net/durgesh0000/KabZG/

Answer 4

So there's no way to just set font-weight (or font-size or font-family...) in one JS command? It all has to be in one complete font string?