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.js

A simple and powerful Javascript HTML5 canvas library.

• Website
• GOTCHAS
• Contributing, Developing and More

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Features

• Out of the box interactions such as scale, move, rotate, skew, group...
• Built in shapes, controls, animations, image filters, gradients, patterns, brushes...
• JPG, PNG, JSON and SVG i/o
• Typed and modular
• Unit tested

Supported Browsers/Environments

Context	Supported Version	Notes
Firefox	✔️	modern version (tbd)
Safari	✔️	version >= 10.1
Opera	✔️	chromium based
Chrome	✔️	modern version (tbd)
Edge	✔️	chromium based
Edge Legacy	❌
IE11	❌
Node.js	✔️	Node.js installation

Fabric.js Does not use transpilation by default, the browser version we support is determined by the level of canvas api we want to use and some js syntax. While JS can be easily transpiled, canvas API can't.

Installation

$ npm install fabric --save
// or
$ yarn add fabric

// es6 imports
import { fabric } from 'fabric';

//  or cjs
const fabric = require('fabric').fabric;

Browser

See browser modules for using es6 imports in the browser or use a dedicated bundler.

Node.js

Fabric.js depends on node-canvas for a canvas implementation (HTMLCanvasElement replacement) and jsdom for a window implementation on node. This means that you may encounter node-canvas limitations and bugs.

Follow these instructions to get node-canvas up and running.

Quick Start

Plain HTML

<canvas id="canvas" width="300" height="300"></canvas>

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/fabric"></script>
<script>
  const canvas = new fabric.Canvas('canvas');
  const rect = new fabric.Rect({
    top: 100,
    left: 100,
    width: 60,
    height: 70,
    fill: 'red',
  });
  canvas.add(rect);
</script>

ReactJS

import React, { useEffect, useRef } from 'react';
import { fabric } from 'fabric';

export const FabricJSCanvas = () => {
  const canvasEl = useRef(null);
  useEffect(() => {
    const options = { ... };
    const canvas = new fabric.Canvas(canvasEl.current, options);
    // make the fabric.Canvas instance available to your app
    updateCanvasContext(canvas);
    return () => {
      updateCanvasContext(null);
      canvas.dispose();
    }
  }, []);

  return (<canvas width="300" height="300" ref={canvasEl}/>)
});

Node.js

const http = require('http');
const { fabric } = require('fabric');

const port = 8080;

http
  .createServer((req, res) => {
    const canvas = new fabric.Canvas(null, { width: 100, height: 100 });
    const rect = new fabric.Rect({ width: 20, height: 50, fill: '#ff0000' });
    const text = new fabric.Text('fabric.js', { fill: 'blue', fontSize: 24 });
    canvas.add(rect, text);
    canvas.renderAll();
    if (req.url === '/download') {
      res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'image/png');
      res.setHeader('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename="fabric.png"');
      canvas.createPNGStream().pipe(res);
    } else if (req.url === '/view') {
      canvas.createPNGStream().pipe(res);
    } else {
      const imageData = canvas.toDataURL();
      res.writeHead(200, '', { 'Content-Type': 'text/html' });
      res.write(`<img src="${imageData}" />`);
      res.end();
    }
  })
  .listen(port, (err) => {
    if (err) throw err;
    console.log(
      `> Ready on http://localhost:${port}, http://localhost:${port}/view, http://localhost:${port}/download`
    );
  });

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Other Solutions

Project	Description	Demo
Three.js	3D graphics
PixiJS	WebGL renderer
Konva	Similar features	❌
Canvas2PDF	PDF renderer
html-to-image	HTML to image/canvas

More Resources

• Demos on fabricjs.com
• Fabric.js on Twitter
• Fabric.js on CodeTriage
• Fabric.js on Stack Overflow
• Fabric.js on jsfiddle
• Fabric.js on Codepen.io

Credits

• kangax
• asturur on Twitter
• melchiar
• ShaMan123
• 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
• Shutterstock for the time and resources invested in using and improving Fabric.js
• and all the other contributors

Changelog

[6.0.0-beta19]

• feat(LayoutManager): Expose objects registration #9661
• fix(Object): support specyfing toCanvasElement canvas #9652
• ci(): no src imports #9657
• fix(textStyles): Split text into graphemes correctly #9646
• fix(ActiveSelection): static default inheritance #9635
• fix(StaticCanvas): StaticCanvas setDimensions typings #9618
• refactor(): Align gradient with class registry usage, part of #9144 #9627
• refactor(): Align shadow with class registry, part of #9144 #9626
• cd() Surface the minified build as standard when importing. #9624
• chore(): removed unused code from Path render function #9619