> > What if we could also vectorize 2D <canvas> elements controlled by JavaScript? […]
> I'm very surprised to hear this. So printing, either to PDF or to actual printers, may reveal more information about what was drawn to the canvas than normal display, especially if no effort has been made to remove overdrawn paint records. That can have an interesting, if only hypothetical, consequence...
The canvas API is all imperative code, so you might think it’s fairly opaque. That’s what I thought anyway, until recently I hacked on a someone’s generated art demo, mostly to glean insights into the algorithms used. As I looked through the actual canvas-specific code, it struck me that 1) it’s exceedingly statically analyzable and 2) that the imperative APIs could trivially translate to an incremental SVG rendering, because their primitives are nearly identical apart from the imperative/declarative distinction.
Mentioning this mainly because if there’s anything interesting to learn about a particular usage of canvas, it would probably not be a huge investment to learn it. Either by static analysis or by rendering canvas calls incrementally to SVG, anything overdrawn or obscured is sitting right there to inspect without any special browser-internal faculties.
> I'm very surprised to hear this. So printing, either to PDF or to actual printers, may reveal more information about what was drawn to the canvas than normal display, especially if no effort has been made to remove overdrawn paint records. That can have an interesting, if only hypothetical, consequence...
The canvas API is all imperative code, so you might think it’s fairly opaque. That’s what I thought anyway, until recently I hacked on a someone’s generated art demo, mostly to glean insights into the algorithms used. As I looked through the actual canvas-specific code, it struck me that 1) it’s exceedingly statically analyzable and 2) that the imperative APIs could trivially translate to an incremental SVG rendering, because their primitives are nearly identical apart from the imperative/declarative distinction.
Mentioning this mainly because if there’s anything interesting to learn about a particular usage of canvas, it would probably not be a huge investment to learn it. Either by static analysis or by rendering canvas calls incrementally to SVG, anything overdrawn or obscured is sitting right there to inspect without any special browser-internal faculties.