Scrawl-canvas Alternatives

Scrawl-canvas reviews and mentions

• Svelte 5 Released
  20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Oct 2024

  I went with Svelte when I built out the website for my canvas library a few years back[1]. It's proved to be easy to maintain the site, and I particularly like that it supported my vanilla JS library (which I use on the site's landing page) with minimal fuss.

  At some point I want to update the site to use Sveltekit, which I'd been experimenting with in personal projects. But then the team announced Svelte 5 and these things called "runes" and ... I don't know. Having just passed my 60th birthday I'm getting to a stage in my life when keeping up with all the New Shiny makes me wonder if it's worth the effort, or if I should be doing more interesting stuff like creating new content for the site instead.

  [1] - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/

• p5.js
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Aug 2024
• Figma's Journey to TypeScript
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 May 2024

  I don't like Typescript because it forces me to think about types and data structures and stuff. Which is a Good Thing because I absolutely have to think about that stuff when working on large codebases with a team of colleagues: without the inline documentation and text editor help TS gives me when working on those codebases I'd be (at least!) 10x slower when refactoring old code or adding new code. And nobody wants to pay a slow developer!

  However ... the one place I refuse to use Typescript is in my side project - a JS canvas library. I can justify this because: 1. it's a big codebase, but I know every line of it intimately having spent the last 10 years (re-)writing it; 2. nobody else contributes (and I kinda like it that way); and 3. I keep a close eye on competing canvas libraries and I've watched several of them go through the immense (frustrating!) work of converting their codebases to TS over the past few years and, seriously, I don't need that pain in my not-paid-for life.

  Even so, I do maintain a .d.ts file for the library's 'API' (the functions devs would use when building a canvas using my library) because the testing, documentation and autocompletion help it offers is too useful to ignore. It is additional work, but it's just one file[1] and I can live with that.

  [1] https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/blob/v8/source/s...

• Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Mar 2024

  > working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place

  I can confirm this. I've been working on a (much simpler!) text layout engine for my canvas library over the past couple of months and the amount of complexity associated with just stamping some glyphs onto a canvas has left me screaming at my laptop on an almost daily basis. Getting a decent underline was a proud moment!

  Question: did you ever find out what algorithm the various browsers are using to calculate how many words can fit on a given line? I'm almost there, except words will occasionally jump between lines when I scale the text. Really annoying!

  The PR's still a work in progress, but I've got all the functionality I want in there (shaping lines to fit in non-rectangular containers, styling text, text along a non-straight line, dynamic updates, etc). Just need to test and document it all now ... https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/pull/75

• Ask HN: What are you working on this year?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2024

  I've got myself organised and prepared a List Of Things To Do[1] to make my 2D Javascript library even better than it already is. Given that I've been working on the library for over 10 years now, and have never before set out such a list, I call this Progress!

  [1] https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/discussions/cate...

• Pixelating Live with SVG
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023

  'Kay, I don't know if this anywhere close to what the OP wants, but this sort of live browser tab manipulation is possible to do using a mix of a a canvas element and the browser's Screen Capture API[1] (plus my JS canvas library, once I merge and publish the changes into its next release[2]).

  This solution[3] shows the modified browser tab in a separate browser tab. I've got no idea whether it's possible to do the same sort of trick in the same tab (but probably not). I also have no idea how secure the Screen Capture API is - I'd get very nervous about doing this sort of thing when looking at my bank's online portal!

  [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...

  [2] https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/pull/57

  [3] Youtube video of the effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCi6LmKMAo0

• Scrawl-canvas 2D canvas library – proposed roadmap
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2023
• Scrawl-canvas - a Javascript library for working with the HTML5 &lt;canvas&gt; element
  1 project | /r/javascript | 2 Mar 2023
• Motion Canvas – Visualize complex ideas programmatically
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2023

  My canvas library's README[1] has a video embedded in it. FWIW I'm not convinced it adds anything to the library's sales pitch.

  [1] https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas

• Egui commit: Implement accessibility APIs via AccessKit
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Dec 2022

  > And I’m just mentioning some of the unfixable problems with this approach

  I agree that using a canvas instead of leveraging existing accessibility supplied by HTML/CSS/JS and the DOM is an accessibility nightmare.

  However, I disagree that canvas accessibility issues are "unfixable". Difficult? Yes. But not unfixable. In my view, the element works best in partnership with its wider environment (HTML/CSS/JS and the DOM), not as a replacement for it. With that in mind, we can start to tackle the accessibility issues you raise - fonts, links, interactions, etc.[1][2]

  I have an ambition to one day become intelligent enough to understand/code in Rust, and I'm really glad to see that people are thinking about accessibility as a fundamental part of UIs being developed in Rust.

  [1] - Which is what my JS 2d canvas library tries to do: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/

  [2] - My thoughts on accessibility, and how I try to fix them using my library: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/learn/eleventh-lesson/

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