fabric

What is fabric?

The 'fabric' npm package is a powerful and versatile library for working with HTML5 canvas. It provides an object model on top of the canvas element, making it easier to create, manipulate, and interact with graphics. Fabric.js is particularly useful for creating rich, interactive applications such as image editors, drawing applications, and data visualization tools.

What are fabric's main functionalities?

Creating and Manipulating Shapes

This feature allows you to create and manipulate basic shapes like rectangles, circles, and polygons. The code sample demonstrates how to create a red rectangle and add it to the canvas.

const fabric = require('fabric').fabric;
const canvas = new fabric.Canvas('c');
const rect = new fabric.Rect({
  left: 100,
  top: 100,
  fill: 'red',
  width: 20,
  height: 20
});
canvas.add(rect);

Working with Images

Fabric.js makes it easy to work with images. You can load images from URLs, manipulate them, and add them to the canvas. The code sample shows how to load an image from a URL and add it to the canvas.

const fabric = require('fabric').fabric;
const canvas = new fabric.Canvas('c');
fabric.Image.fromURL('http://example.com/image.jpg', function(img) {
  img.set({ left: 100, top: 100 });
  canvas.add(img);
});

Text Manipulation

Fabric.js provides robust text manipulation capabilities. You can create text objects, style them, and add them to the canvas. The code sample demonstrates how to create a text object with the content 'Hello, world!' and add it to the canvas.

const fabric = require('fabric').fabric;
const canvas = new fabric.Canvas('c');
const text = new fabric.Text('Hello, world!', {
  left: 100,
  top: 100,
  fill: 'blue'
});
canvas.add(text);

Event Handling

Fabric.js supports event handling for interactive applications. You can attach event listeners to objects on the canvas. The code sample shows how to attach a 'selected' event listener to a rectangle.

const fabric = require('fabric').fabric;
const canvas = new fabric.Canvas('c');
const rect = new fabric.Rect({
  left: 100,
  top: 100,
  fill: 'red',
  width: 20,
  height: 20
});
canvas.add(rect);
rect.on('selected', function() {
  console.log('Rectangle selected');
});

Other packages similar to fabric

konva

Konva is a 2D canvas library for creating desktop and mobile applications. It provides a high-level API for working with shapes, images, and text, similar to Fabric.js. However, Konva is optimized for performance and is often used in applications requiring high frame rates, such as games and animations.

paper

Paper.js is an open-source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph/Document Object Model (DOM) and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics. Compared to Fabric.js, Paper.js is more focused on vector graphics and offers more advanced path manipulation capabilities.

p5

p5.js is a JavaScript library that makes coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners. It is built on top of the HTML5 Canvas and provides a simple way to create graphics and interactive content. While p5.js is more general-purpose and beginner-friendly, Fabric.js offers more specialized tools for working with canvas-based applications.

README

Fabric

Fabric.js is a framework that makes it easy to work with HTML5 canvas element. It is an interactive object model on top of canvas element. It is also an SVG-to-canvas parser.

Using Fabric.js, you can create and populate objects on canvas; objects like simple geometrical shapes — rectangles, circles, ellipses, polygons, or more complex shapes consisting of hundreds or thousands of simple paths. You can then scale, move, and rotate these objects with the mouse; modify their properties — color, transparency, z-index, etc. You can also manipulate these objects altogether — grouping them with a simple mouse selection.

Contributions are very much welcome!

Goals

• Unit tested (1660+ tests at the moment)
• Modular (~60 small "classes", modules, mixins)
• Cross-browser
• Fast
• Encapsulated in one object
• No browser sniffing for critical functionality
• Runs under ES5 strict mode
• Runs on a server under Node.js

Supported browsers

• Firefox 2+
• Safari 3+
• Opera 9.64+
• Chrome (all versions should work)
• IE9+

With help of Explorer Canvas

• IE8 (incomplete — about 17 failing tests at the moment)
• IE7,6 (incomplete - about 27 failing tests at the moment)

See Fabric limitations in Old IE.

You can run automated unit tests right in the browser.

History

Fabric.js started as a foundation for design editor on printio.ru — interactive online store with ability to create your own designs. The idea was to create Javascript-based editor, which would make it easy to manipulate vector shapes and images on T-Shirts. Since performance was one of the most critical requirements, we chose canvas over SVG. While SVG is excellent with static shapes, it's not as performant as canvas when it comes to dynamic manipulation of objects (movement, scaling, rotation, etc.). Fabric.js was heavily inspired by Ernest Delgado's canvas experiment. In fact, code from Ernest's experiment was the foundation of an entire framework. Later, Fabric.js grew into a collection of distinct object types and got an SVG-to-canvas parser.

Building

1. Install Node.js

2. Build distribution file [~76K minified, ~22K gzipped]

    $ node build.js
   

   • Or build a custom distribution file, by passing (comma separated) module names to be included.

       $ node build.js modules=text,serialization,parser
       // or
       $ node build.js modules=text
       // or
       $ node build.js modules=parser,text
       // etc.
     

     By default (when none of the modules are specified) only basic functionality is included. See the list of modules below for more information on each one of them. Note that default distribution has support for static canvases only.

     To get minimal distribution with interactivity, make sure to include corresponding module:

       $ node build.js modules=interaction
     

   • You can also include all modules like so:

       $ node build.js modules=ALL
     

3. Create a minified distribution file

    # Using YUICompressor (default option)
    $ node build.js modules=... minifier=yui
   
    # or Google Closure Compiler
    $ node build.js modules=... minifier=closure
   

Demos

• Demos
• Kitchensink demo
• Benchmarks

Documentation

Documentation is always available at http://fabricjs.com/docs/.

Also see official 4-part intro series, presentation from BK.js and presentation from Falsy Values for an overview of fabric.js, how it works, and its features.

Optional modules

These are the optional modules that could be specified for inclusion, when building custom version of fabric:

• text — Adds support for fabric.Text
• serialization — Adds support for loadFromJSON, loadFromDatalessJSON, and clone methods on fabric.Canvas
• interaction — Adds support for interactive features of fabric — selecting/transforming objects/groups via mouse/touch devices.
• parser — Adds support for fabric.parseSVGDocument, fabric.loadSVGFromURL, and fabric.loadSVGFromString
• image_filters — Adds support for image filters, such as grayscale of white removal.
• easing — Adds support for animation easing functions
• node — Adds support for running fabric under node.js, with help of jsdom and node-canvas libraries.
• freedrawing — Adds support for free drawing
• gestures — Adds support for multitouch gestures with help of Event.js
• object_straightening — Adds support for rotating an object to one of 0, 90, 180, 270, etc. depending on which is angle is closer.

Additional flags for build script are:

• no-strict — Strips "use strict" directives from source
• no-svg-export — Removes svg exporting functionality
• no-es5-compat - Removes ES5 compat methods (Array.prototype., String.prototype., Function.prototype.*)

For example:

node build.js modules=ALL exclude=json no-strict no-svg-export

Examples of use

Adding red rectangle to canvas

<canvas id="canvas" width="300" height="300"></canvas>
...
var canvas = new fabric.Canvas('canvas');

var rect = new fabric.Rect({
  top: 100,
  left: 100,
  width: 60,
  height: 70,
  fill: 'red'
});

canvas.add(rect);

Staying in touch

Follow @fabric.js or @kangax on twitter. Questions, suggestions — fabric.js on Google Groups.

Credits

• Ernest Delgado for the original idea of manipulating images on canvas.
• Maxim "hakunin" Chernyak for ideas, and help with various parts of the library throughout its life.
• Sergey Nisnevich for help with geometry logic.
• Stefan Kienzle for help with bugs, features, documentation, github issues
• Github contributors: @Kingsquare, @cleercode, @jarek-itmore, @sunrei, @khronnuz, @ollym, @garg, @sjpemberton09, @willmcneilly, @davidjrice, @coulix, and more

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2008-2013 Printio (Juriy Zaytsev, Maxim Chernyak)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.