Question

I have a small application where I need to generate textPath labels for arcs. I’m drawing the arcs via Raphael and that is working great. However Raphael has no support for textPaths. We can add them to the svg element via jQuery but they don’t render for some reason. When I duplicate the dynamically generated code statically it renders fine.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" width="600" height="600">
  <desc>Created with Raphaël</desc><defs></defs>
  <a title="This is a test entry">
    <path fill="none" stroke="#1e79a0" d="M395.2627944162883,355A110,110,0,0,1,199.5099996593139,344.74103073833805" style="stroke-width: 20px; " stroke-width="20" id="This_is_a_test_entry"></path>
  </a>
  <text>
    <textpath xlink:href="#This_is_a_test_entry">This is a test entry</textpath>
  </text>
</svg>

With the above code you never see the label for the arc. However when the following is hard coded it renders as expected:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" width="600" height="600">
  <a title="Bacon">
    <path id="Arc" fill="none" stroke="#1e79a0" d="M395.2627944162883,355A110,110,0,0,1,201.13265490709162,348.2208261467985" style="stroke-width: 20;" stroke-width="20">
    </path>
  </a>
  <text>
    <textPath xlink:href="#Arc">This is an Arc</textPath>
  </text>
</svg>

Any insight as to why I’m not seeing my entire svg would be much appreciated.

EDIT:

I’ve made changes to my javascript and I think it’s almost there but the textPath still won’t render. Here is the current code, mostly thanks to Femi:

function drawRange(start, end, R, range, id, title) {
                    var color = "hsb(".concat(Math.round(R) / 200, ",", end / 360, ", .75)");
                    var key_position = key[id];
                    var svg_bits = document.getElementsByTagName('svg')[0].childNodes;
                    var svgns = document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/2000/svg', "path");
                    var path;
                    range.attr({title: title});
                    range.animate({arc: [start, end, R]}, 900, ">");
                    //Add an id to the path element that was just drawn.  This doesn't seem to help though.
                    for(var i = 0; i < svg_bits.length; i++) {
                        if (svg_bits[i].tagName == "a" && svg_bits[i].getAttribute('title') == title){
                            path = svg_bits[i].childNodes[0];
                        }
                    }
                    path.setAttribute('id', title);
                    //Add the name to the key, set the color and unhide the element.
                    $(key_position).html(range.attr("title"));
                    $(key_position).css('color', Raphael.getRGB(color).hex);
                    $(key_position).show();
                };



function makeSVG(tag, attrs) {
                    var el = document.createElementNS('http://www.w3.org/2000/svg', tag);
                    for (var k in attrs)
                        el.setAttribute(k, attrs[k]);
                    return el;
                };

function addLabel(label) {
                    var text = makeSVG("text", {});
                    var title = makeSVG("textPath", {"xlink:href":'#' + label.replace(/\s/g, '_')});
                    title.appendChild(document.createTextNode(label));
                    text.appendChild(title);
                    r.canvas.appendChild(text);
                };

I get a bounding box of 0x0 for the textPath but no textPath.

Answer 1

So, after finding a patch to Raphael here and making a small tweak to the patch it is working. I’m still not sure what I was missing but the textPaths now render and everyone is happy. Thanks to everyone for the help.