Typographic effects in canvas

html5rocks.com

56 points·DanielRibeiro··9 comments

Typographic effects would be working with the glyphs themselves, or composing letters, words into something interesting. I was pretty excited by the title: support for OpenType ligatures and features in browsers is pretty weak, and if <canvas> could act as a polyfill it would be pretty cool.

What is here are graphic effects, and while technically interesting, aesthetically not pleasing.

Also not useful for SEO or a host of other requirements on the web.

Reading through the article, I was thinking if a canvas-based photoshop-like app could be built. Is anyone aware of an article that explains the architecture of Photoshop? How pixels are processed through its stack of layers?

Gimp might be a better source of inspiration for this sort of thing.

Looking at GEGL, which gimp is moving to might be a good way. It's also a nice system that could get something more than photoshop.

Sure it could, albeit in a more limited way. It has been done actually, at least in Flash (which includes some similar bitmap features, although it is vector based).

The main problem, as is with Flash based editors, would be performance.

>Is anyone aware of an article that explains the architecture of Photoshop? How pixels are processed through its stack of layers?

Well, the layers are just different images with alpha transparency drawn on top of each other, and the blend modes are just math done between two layers' pixel values.

Here's an (rather basic) article:

http://photoblogstop.com/photoshop/photoshop-blend-modes-exp...

I wouldn't call it photoshop, but did you have something like this in mind: http://pjtops.com/app/neonTextEffects/

Text effects, not typography.

I was hoping to see underline.

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