Letter spacing in canvas element

Question

The question says it all pretty much. I\'ve been searching around and starting to worry that it\'s impossible.

I\'ve got this canvas element that I\'m drawing text t

Answer 1

I'm not sure if it should work (per specs), but in some browsers (Chrome) you can set the letter-spacing CSS property on the element itself, and it will be applied to all text drawn on the context. (Works in Chrome v56, does not work in Firefox v51 or IE v11.)

Note that in Chrome v56 you must re-get the canvas 2d context (and re-set any values you care about) after each change to the letter-spacing style; the spacing appears to be baked into the 2d context that you get.

Example: https://jsfiddle.net/hg4pbsne/1/

var inp = document.querySelectorAll('input'),
    can = document.querySelector('canvas'),
    ctx = can.getContext('2d');
    can.width = can.offsetWidth;

[].forEach.call(inp,function(inp){ inp.addEventListener('input', redraw, false) });
redraw();

function redraw(){
  ctx.clearRect(0,0,can.width,can.height);
  can.style.letterSpacing = inp[0].value + 'px';

  ctx = can.getContext('2d');
  ctx.textAlign = 'center';
  ctx.textBaseline = 'middle';
  ctx.font = '4em sans-serif';
  ctx.fillText('Hello', can.width/2, can.height*1/4);
  
  can.style.letterSpacing = inp[1].value + 'px';
  ctx = can.getContext('2d');
  ctx.textAlign = 'center';
  ctx.textBaseline = 'middle';
  ctx.font = '4em sans-serif';
  ctx.fillText('World', can.width/2, can.height*3/4);
};

canvas { background:white }
canvas, label { display:block; width:400px; margin:0.5em auto }

hello spacing: 
world spacing: 

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Original, cross-browser answer:

This is not possible; the HTML5 Canvas does not have all the text-transformation power of CSS in HTML. I would suggest that you should combine the appropriate technologies for each usage. Use HTML layered with Canvas and perhaps even SVG, each doing what it does best.

Note also that 'rolling your own'—drawing each character with a custom offset—is going to produce bad results for most fonts, given that there are letter kerning pairs and pixel-aligned font hinting.