An Infinite Canvas Tutorial

My free course in Gumroad. Feel free to rate!

What is an Infinite Canvas? The term "infinite" in infinitecanvas is described as follows:

• High scalability. Users can freely organize content structures in a non-linear fashion.
• Zooming. Emulates the "zoom in" to get an overview and "zoom out" to observe details as in the real world.
• Direct manipulation. Provides intuitive editing capabilities for basic shapes, including moving, grouping, and modifying styles.

The infinitecanvas showcases numerous examples ranging from design tools to creative boards, including some well-known products such as: Figma, Modyfi, Motiff, rnote, tldraw, excalidraw and so on.

As a front-end developer, I am very interested in the rendering technologies involved. Although tldraw, excalidraw, and others generally use more user-friendly technologies like Canvas2D/SVG, there are also many editors and design tools in the JS and Rust ecosystems that use more low-level rendering technologies for 2D graphics with GPU acceleration to achieve better performance and experience:

• Figma uses a tile-based rendering engine written in C++, compiled into WASM and then calls WebGL and WebGPU for rendering.
• Motiff also uses a tile-based rendering engine with WebGL.
• Modyfi uses wgpu from the Rust ecosystem, also compiled into WASM and then calls WebGL2 for rendering.
• Zed uses GPUI to render rectangles, shadows, text, images, and other UI elements.
• Vello and xilem experimentally use Compute Shader for 2D rendering.

Therefore, in this tutorial, I hope to implement the following features:

• Use @antv/g-device-api as a hardware abstraction layer, supporting WebGL1/2 and WebGPU.
• Use Becsy to implement high-performance, highly scalable systems based on the ECS architecture.
• Use SDF (Signed Distance Field) rendering for circles, ellipses, rectangles, etc.
• GPU-accelerated text and Bezier curve rendering.
• Use rough.js to support hand-drawn styles.
• Use CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) to support collaborative Yjs.
• Referencing mapbox and Figma, attempt to use tile-based rendering.

I hope to rewrite the rendering part of the canvas with Rust in the future, but the current project completion is still relatively low:

• wgpu is a very reliable hardware abstraction layer, which can even implement the backend for piet.
• Shaders can basically be reused.
• Hand-drawn styles can use rough-rs.
• y-crdt is the Rust implementation of Yjs.

Let's get started!

Getting Started

The course project uses pnpm workspace, so you need to install pnpm first.

pnpm i

After entering the course directory, run Vite devserver:

cd packages/lesson_001
pnpm run dev

Or you can run the site locally:

pnpm run build
cd packages/site
pnpm run dev

If you want to use it in your own project, you can refer to:

• @infinite-canvas-tutorial/ecs
• @infinite-canvas-tutorial/webcomponents

Lesson 1 - Initialize canvas 🔗

• A hardware abstraction layer based on WebGL1/2 and WebGPU.
• Canvas API design.
• Implementing a simple plugin system.
• Implementing a rendering plugin based on the hardware abstraction layer.

Lesson 2 - Draw a circle 🔗

• Adding shapes to the canvas.
• Drawing a circle using SDF.
• Anti Aliasing.
• Dirty flag design pattern.

Lesson 3 - Scene graph and transform 🔗

• Transformations. Make shapes support pan, zoom, rotate, and skew transformations.
• Scene graph.

Lesson 4 - Camera 🔗

• What is a Camera?
• Projection transformation.
• Camera transformation.
• Camera animation. Using Landmark transition between different camera states.

Lesson 5 - Grid 🔗

• Drawing straight lines using Line Geometry or screen-space techniques.
• Drawing dots grid.
• Drawing wireframe for Geometry.

Grid	Wireframe

Lesson 6 - Event system 🔗

• Implement an event system compatible with DOM Event API.
• How to pick a circle.
• Implement a drag-and-drop plugin based on our event system.
• Support for pinch zoom gestures.

Lesson 7 - Web UI 🔗

• Developing Web UI with Lit and Shoelace
• Implementing a canvas component
• Implementing a zoom toolbar component
• Implementing a dark theme

Lesson 8 - Optimize performance 🔗

• What is a draw call
• Reducing draw calls with culling
• Reducing draw calls by combining batches
• Using spatial indexing to improve pickup efficiency

Lesson 9 - Draw ellipse and rectangle 🔗

• How to derive the SDF representation of an ellipse or rounded rectangle
• Render drop-shadow and inner shadow for SDF
• How to determine if a point is inside an ellipse or rounded rectangle

Drop Shadow	Inner Shadow

Lesson 10 - Import and export images 🔗

• Exporting canvas content to PNG, JPEG and SVG formats
• Rendering images in the canvas
• Extending the capabilities of SVG, using stroke-alignment as an example

Lesson 11 - Test and server-side rendering 🔗

• Jest-based test environment setup, including local and CI environments
• Using unit tests to improve code coverage
• Visual regression testing
  • Server-side rendering based on headless-gl, targets WebGL1
  • E2E testing base on Playwright, targets WebGL2 & WebGPU
• E2E UI testing
• Browser Compatibility Test based on BrowserStack
• Render in WebWorker

Lesson 12 - Draw polyline 🔗

• Why not just use gl.LINES?
• Building Mesh in the CPU or Shader
• Building segments, caps and joints, antialiasing, and drawing dashed lines in shader
• How to calculate its bounding box?

Lesson 13 - Draw path and sketchy style 🔗

• Experimenting with SDF
• Trying to draw fills using some triangulating methods and strokes using polylines
  • Support earcut and libtess.js two triangulation schemes
  • Handle holes in the path correctly
  • Support fillRule property
• Draw some hand-drawn shapes

Path and rough shapes	Fill rule

Lesson 14 - Canvas mode and auxiliary UI 🔗

• Implement zIndex and sizeAttenuation
• Add more canvas modes, e.g. move and select and shapes

Lesson 15 - Text rendering 🔗

• What's TextMetrics and how to get it in server and browser side
• What's shaping? Implement letterSpacing and kerning
• Paragraph layout
  • Auto wordbreak
  • BiDi, arabic shaping included
  • Handle clusters
  • Support text-align
• How to generate SDF atlas and use it to draw
• How to use ESDT and MSDF to improve text rendering quality
• How to draw bitmap font
• How to draw emoji

Render text with SDF atlas	Bitmap font, emoji, BiDi and clusters

Lesson 16 - Text advanced features 🔗

• Using Bezier curves to render text, shaping with OpenType and Harfbuzz
• Render TeX math
• Text stroke, decoration, dropshadow and text along path
• Physical text rendering
• Load web font with web font loader

Shaping TeX with MathJax	Physical text

Text decoration	Text stroke

Lesson 17 - Gradient and Pattern 🔗

• Use CanvasGradient to implement gradients
  • Imperative. Create textures using the Device API
  • Declarative. Supports CSS gradient syntax: linear-gradient, radial-gradient, conic-gradient
  • Use Shoelace to implement gradient configuration panel
• Use Shader to implement Mesh Gradient
  • Simulate random
  • Value Noise and Gradient Noise
  • Voronoi, FBM and Domain Warping
  • Server-side rendering in AWS lambda function
• Export SVG
• Use CanvasPattern to implement repeating patterns

Linear, Radial, Conic Gradient	Mesh Gradient

Lesson 18 - Refactor with ECS 🔗

• What is ECS architecture
• Using ECS architecture to refactor the application with Becsy
• Using Spectrum to implement UIs instead of shoelace

Top nav and zoom toolbar	Layers and properties panels

Lesson 19 - History 🔗

• Implement a simple history system, including undo and redo

Lesson 20 - Collaboration 🔗

• Implement collaboration through CRDT

Lesson 21 - Transformer 🔗

• Resize, lock aspect ratio and centered scaling
• Rotate and change the rotation origin
• Nudge shapes with arrow key

Rotate anchor	Resize anchor

Lesson 22 - VectorNetwork 🔗

• Limitations of SVG Path
• What is VectorNetwork

Lesson 23 - Mindmap 🔗

• Analyze d3-tree, d3-flextree and @antv/hierarchy

D3 flextree	Mindmap

Lesson 24 - Context menu and clipboard 🔗

• How to implement context menu with Spectrum
• Adjust z-index with bring forward and send back
• Writes and reads clipboard content, supports pasting serialized graphics, non-vector images, SVG and plain text
• Drag-and-drop import of image files from file systems and pages

Context menu	Drag'n'drop image

Lesson 25 - Draw rect mode and brush 🔗

• Draw shapes mode: draw rect, ellipse, line and arrow with dragging
• Brush mode

Draw rect mode	Pencil tool	Draw arrow

Lesson 26 - Selection tools 🔗

• Single and multi-selection with Shift keypress
• Marquee selection
• Lasso tool

Lesson 27 - Snap and alignment 🔗

• Snap to pixel grid
• Snap to objects

Snap to pixel grid

Lesson 28 - Integrating with AI 🔗

• Common post-processing
• Integrating with AI
  • Use chatbox
  • Use Nano banana to edit image, e.g remove background
  • Use SAM with WebGPU