Get SVG from canvas element and save it

Question

Currently I\'m creating a small application for a friend, who´s starting his PhD and needs to build some network graphs. So far everything works fine using the a Force Direc

Answer 1

If you want to preserve it as a vector graphic instead of as a raster, you can try one of the libraries that translate the canvas API operations to svg.

For SVGKit:

var svgkitContext = new SVGCanvas(150,150);

function draw(ctx) {
   // ... normal canvas drawing commands go here ...
}

// draw to SVGKit canvas (svg) instead of canvasElement.getContext("2d")
draw(svgkitContext);

Full running example of the above.

For canvas-svg:

var canvasSVGContext = new CanvasSVG.Deferred();
canvasSVGContext.wrapCanvas(document.querySelector("canvas"));
var canvasContext = document.querySelector("canvas").getContext("2d");

function draw(ctx) {
    // ... normal canvas drawing commands go here ...
}

// draw to html5 canvas and record as svg at the same time
draw(canvasContext);

// append the svg result
var svg = document.appendChild(canvasContext.getSVG());

Full running example of the above.

For generating svg instead:

Another option is of course to make the graph as an svg in the first place, d3.js is a javascript library that makes it easy to do this, see e.g this example of a force directed graph.