Zooming SVG is blury or pixelated, not sharp - javascript

vI know to some extent this is a known issue that has been asked here but never answered, but I'm hoping for some additional insight.
I have a simple SVG image in a div on a web page. I want to be able to zoom the image using pinch gestures and have the SVG render sharply. It doesn't need to be sharp during the zoom, but should be sharp after the gesture is complete.
I'm doing my testing on a Windows 8.1 computer with a touch monitor, on an iPad, and on an old Android Galaxy Tab. On the main computer, I'm using IE11 and Chrome. For handling touch gestures, I'm using Hammer.js. I'm doing the zooming by modifying the transform CSS using the jQuery css() function (I'm setting scale3d and translate3d).
IE11 on my computer works exactly like I would like it to. It keeps the SVG image sharp throughout the pinch zoom and the image is always sharp regardless of when I set the CSS.
Chrome on my computer always renders the SVG blocky when I am zoomed in using pinch zoom. It is blocky during the zoom and does not get sharp afterwards. If I add a call to zoom the image after the page (x13) is loaded, the image is sharp. If I use a setTimeout() call to reset the zoom and then rezoom the image after the pinch zoom ends, the image is sharp.
On the iPad and Android tablet, the SVG never renders sharply, regardless of when I zoom it in code.
Does anyone have any ideas of how to reliably end up with a sharp rendering of SVG after a pinch-zoom is completed? Does anyone have a better solution? Using the SVG viewBox to zoom and pan during the gesture does not provide good enough performance for our more complex SVG images. I'm thinking of attempting to use the hardware accelerated scale3d/translate3d during the gesture and then attempt to convert this to new SVG viewBox settings afterwards, but this is a challenge and I'm not sure panning will work correctly after this is done. Any pointers or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Having just tried to answer your other SVG Question I will have a try at this one.
Michael Mullany is spot on that GPU translations will never give you a sharp image. This is because the GPU just maps one array of pixels to a new one. Because it has no concept of lines or rectangles the resolution is set by the time the GPU gets the image. The CPU will always struggle to re-render in time for a smooth drag.
What happens to allow some browsers to produce a sharp image is they do clever manipulations like rendering more pixels than they need so some zooming can happen without loss of resolution. These however are completely inconsistent and just not possible to rely on.
The as I see it 'correct' solution is to translate and zoom with hardware accelerated transformations during a pinch or zoom and then to refresh the viewbox with no css transformation when the translation has finished.
Challenges to overcome are
The css transformation will use screen coordinates but the viewBox manipulation will use the SVG coordinate system.
There are browser inconsistencies in both screenCTM and device pixel ratio
limits so that people don't drag or zoom too far need to be calculated in both systems
Pinch centerpoints also need to be calculated in both
To improve performance further the css transforms will be wrapped into updating on the requestAnimationFrame loop.
My working solution is hammerhead2. I am concentrating on desktops and android mobiles first and it seams to be working for them. To simplify the problem zoom is always centered to the screen center. I do however thing this is currently one of the only solutions. Here is an example of it working.

Related

Ag-charts canvas zoom bug

I would like to comment on my problem in case someone has an idea of what it is due to or proposes an alternative solution.
Currently I have a large ag-charts graph that does not fit and it is always necessary to scroll to be able to see it in its entirety but when scrolling the axes are not maintained, so I resorted to the alternative of cloning the graph canvas twice to generate 2 new canvas clipped with "position:fixed" so that they always stay at the ends.
So far there is no problem except that if the browser zoom and/or the windows scale differs from 100%, it affects the cropping of said canvas in an inconsistent way. I was not able to get a rule of 3 to apply the correct zoom multiplier ( with ctx.drawImage() ) due to its inconsistency.
The error stops happening when you test it with a normal canvas that has not been generated by ag-charts
Here I have a very simple Live Demo to test it.
(To reproduce the bug you need to have the zoom applied before the generation of the graph).
I also tried to get the zoom level using:
(Math.round(window.devicePixelRatio*100)/100, -1);
and applying the correspondent ratio using:
.drawImage(canvas,0, 0, canvas.width*ratio, canvas.height*ratio);
but it only works in specific percentages of zoom

Scaling and touch interaction on Retina screens

I have a problem similar to one described in the following questions.
KineticJS : scaling issue while using custom clipFunc on 2x pixel aspect display
In my application: (please try on retina ipad vs normal ipad or desktop browser, even iOS simulator would also do)
There is are two canvas layers, one of them contains a blanket group that I scale with pinch-zoom gesture in the range of 0.5x to 1.5x
On the retina screen my canvas gets zoomed out to 1/4 the screen when at 0.5x
Now, with the change suggested in the comments, I managed to make it scale it properly however touch events are no longer scaled accordingly. Any ideas whats going on here?
Note that it is working perfectly on non-retina screens.
Am using KineticJS 4.4.3 - as its was an academic project that began early this year for proof-of-concept and now I'm continuing it to make a complete application.
Thanks!
My problem got solved after I upgraded to KineticJS 4.7.4
It however broke the clipping code I had as clipFunc was deprecated but that's a different issue which was resolved by resetting clip parameters on dragmove event.
Not an efficient solution but it works for now!

zooming in a HTML5 Canvas

I need some advice on how to set up zooming in and out of a HTML5 JavaScript canvas. I have the functions and switch statement set up just need advice on how to actually enable zoom.
I was considering just making it use the browsers zoom function as I only need it to work on Chrome. Is this recommended?
Thanks
Just use ctx.scale(x, y)
Here is a direct link on MDN, however I advise you to read the whole article.
You can scale in the canvas using the browser's zoom, but just be warned that a canvas is a raster image, so zooming in will introduce aliasing (jaggies). I haven't yet seen a way to draw on a zoomed-in canvas (i.e. canvas pixels are larger than display pixels) without aliasing. And it turns out to be very hard to even work out how much you are zoomed in: How to detect page zoom level in all modern browsers?
If, however, you zoom by redrawing on some event, even using ctx.scale(x, y) as #rezoner points out, rather than allowing the browser to zoom, then you can still draw without aliasing. For a smooth zoom, I would suggest using scale as a quick zoom while the use is zooming quickly, and performing a full-redraw every 1.3x or so and again when they stop zooming. That should give you something like the Google Maps behaviour where you get a rough zoom immediately (good responsiveness), but it updates the view as you continue to zoom.

What HTML5 Canvas Pixel Detection and image manipulation libraries are out there?

I am trying to develop a "Web App" (for lack of better terminology) that displays a sort of interactive map using the HTML5 Canvas element for mobile devices. The map has about 30 buildings (made from semi-transparent PNG images on it) of different shapes and sizes. I want the user to be able to tap on any of the buildings to get information about them. The buildings are often within the same theoretical bounding box of others, so it isn't as simple as just detecting when the user taps in a bounding box (imagine a U shaped building with another building inside the U). Therefore, it should use some sort of raster pixel detection. To make matters more complicated, I need to allow the user to zoom in/out and pan around on the map (because 30 buildings and a map are way too much to show a user on a tiny cellphone screen). So scaling and moving smoothly is a necessity.
I am looking for a JavaScript library that can support these functions:
Image pixel detection
Mobile touch events
Canvas (or stage?) scaling
Usable on mobile devices
So far, I have found KineticJS which supports all of these features. But when I try to move the map with more than 4 buildings on the stage, it is way too jumpy. I tried checking into Fabric.js but it doesn't seem to have pixel detection (as it selects the image when you click within the bounding box, not the actual image itself).
Is there any other JavaScript library out there that can do these things?
Thanks for any help!
The KineticJS is pretty good ( the best lib i found so far )
I never tried to use png images with it, but zooming and panning with a few hundreds primitive objects is pretty smooth (without pixel detection - I imagine the pixel detection is quite cpu expensive operation ).
Maybe you could try overlay standard polygons ( a few for one building ) and attach to the same click/tap event.
Also you don't necessary need to move objects on the canvas you can just put bigger canvas in smaller div ( with overflow:hidden) and drag the whole canvas element.

Web: solution for image rotate and zoom

I have a web page which displays a large image, for example a page from a magazine. I have no control over the image size or orientation. It's possible that the image may need to be rotated by the user to orient it correctly.
Are there any Javascript or Flash solutions that will allow someone to rotate and zoom a given image? Ideally I'd specify a single image and the dimensions to use when displaying it. If the image is larger than those dimensions, the user could zoom in and view a portion of the image in greater detail.
I've seen a couple of solutions for rotating images with straight Javascript and CSS. Raphael would do the trick. There is apparently even an example featuring rotating an image. (it uses SVG but is support on all major browsers)
This one is not cross browser, but is an interesting exercise nevertheless.
As for flash rotation etc...
For rotating images, I used jquery-rotate and it works very well.
It is not totally cross-browser, it doesn't work with IE6 (and probably other old browsers).
For zooming, I guess you could make your own implementation using javascript, you can just resize the image (easy with jQuery).

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