Question

Is it possible to create ovals/ellipses with nicer strokes that have not that “blurred” border similar to:

• http://www.html5canvastutorials.com/kineticjs/html5-canvas-kineticjs-ellipse-tutorial/
• http://www.html5canvastutorials.com/advanced/html5-canvas-ovals/

Can I somehow create more clear stroke line around the oval, or do I have to live with that “blurred” border?

Answer 1

! you can do it ! by doing post-processing :

1) Using globalCompositeOperation :

Edit :
yes, but no : on Chrome at least, ‘destination-in’ does not
match the specifications : the source is used to compute destination
color, so we cannot have single color from a shaded one.
( i did a try on JSBin : http://jsbin.com/ecipiq/4/ )

OR

2) Using getImageData and performance Array :

• draw border in a temp canvas
• getImageData of the canvas
• get a Uint32Array or Uint8Array view on underlying data
• loop linearly within array : if value > threshold set it to border color
• draw the fill of the ellipse on target canvas
• putImageData on target canvas.

Which one ?

• Second one does not require globalCompositeOperation to work.
  But on most browsers (all ?) get/put ImageData are slow as hell, this fact
  alone might invalidate this solution.
  The nice thing is you can precisely decide how to un-antialias.

Other StackOverflow members might have insight on all this.

Any of those solution will be much faster than a hand-written non-aliased
ellipse function.

usefull link for first solution :
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webgl/typed_arrays/

Remarks to get you started faster :
You can get a UInt32Array view on your ImageData with :

var myGetImageData = myTempCanvas.getImageData(0,0,sizeX, sizeY);
sourceBuffer32     = new UInt32Array(myGetImageData.data.buffer);

then sourceBuffer32[i] contains Red, Green, Blue, and transparency packed into one
unsigned 32 bit int. Compare it to 0 to know if pixel is non-black ( != (0,0,0,0) )

OR you can be more precise with a Uint8Array view :

var myGetImageData = myTempCanvas.getImageData(0,0,sizeX, sizeY);
sourceBuffer8     = new Uint8Array(myGetImageData.data.buffer);

If you deal only with shades of grey, then R=G=B, so watch for

sourceBuffer8[4*i]>Threshold

and you can set the i-th pixel to black in one time using the UInt32Array view :

sourceBuffer32[i]=(255<<24)||(255<<16)||(255<<8);

You’ll surely be able to figure out how to deal with other colors than grey/black out of this example.