drawing over an Image in HTML5 Canvas while preserving the image

Question

In HTML5 Canvas, what's the simplest way to draw and move a line over an Image (already on the canvas), preserving the image underneath? (e.g. have a vertical line track the mouse X position)

My current canvas:

$(document).ready(function() {
  canvas = document.getElementById("myCanvas");
  context = canvas.getContext("2d");
  imageObj = new Image();

    imageObj.onload = function() { 
    context.drawImage(imageObj, 0,0);  
  }
  imageObj.src = "http://example.com/some_image.png";
  $('#myCanvas').click(doSomething);
});

Answer 1

You will have to do most of the ground-work with canvas which in this case you will have to implement the functionality to move the line and then redraw everything.

The steps can be:

• Keep the line as an object which can self-render (method on the object)
• Listen to mousemove (in this case) in order to move the line
• For each move, redraw background (image) then render the line at its new position

You can redraw the background as a whole or you can optimize it to just draw over the last line.

Here is some example code of this and a live demo here:

var canvas = document.getElementById('demo'), /// canvas element
    ctx = canvas.getContext('2d'),            /// context
    line = new Line(ctx),                     /// our custom line object
    img = new Image;                          /// the image for bg

ctx.strokeStyle = '#fff';                     /// white line for demo

/// start image loading, when done draw and setup 
img.onload = start;
img.src = 'http://i.imgur.com/O712qpO.jpg';

function start() {
    /// initial draw of image
    ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, demo.width, demo.height);

    /// listen to mouse move (or use jQuery on('mousemove') instead)
    canvas.onmousemove = updateLine;
}

Now all we need to do is to have a mechnism to update the background and the line for each move:

/// updates the line on each mouse move    
function updateLine(e) {

    /// correct mouse position so it's relative to canvas
    var r = canvas.getBoundingClientRect(),
        x = e.clientX - r.left,
        y = e.clientY - r.top;

    /// draw background image to clear previous line
    ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);

    /// update line object and draw it
    line.x1 = x;
    line.y1 = 0;
    line.x2 = x;
    line.y2 = canvas.height;
    line.draw();
}

The custom line object is in this demo very simple:

/// This lets us define a custom line object which self-draws
function Line(ctx) {

    var me = this;

    this.x1 = 0;
    this.x2 = 0;
    this.y1 = 0;
    this.y2 = 0;

    /// call this method to update line        
    this.draw = function() {
        ctx.beginPath();
        ctx.moveTo(me.x1, me.y1);
        ctx.lineTo(me.x2, me.y2);
        ctx.stroke();
    }
}

If you are not gonna do anything specific with the image itself you can also set it as a background-image using CSS. You will still need to clear the canvas before redrawing the line though.