Question

Is it possible to fix the width and height of an HTML5 canvas element?

The usual way is the following :

<canvas id="canvas" width="300" height="300"></canvas>

Answer 1

The canvas DOM element has .height and .width properties that correspond to the height="…" and width="…" attributes. Set them to numeric values in JavaScript code to resize your canvas. For example:

var canvas = document.getElementsByTagName('canvas')[0];
canvas.width  = 800;
canvas.height = 600;

Note that this clears the canvas, though you should follow with ctx.clearRect( 0, 0, ctx.canvas.width, ctx.canvas.height); to handle those browsers that don’t fully clear the canvas. You’ll need to redraw of any content you wanted displayed after the size change.

Note further that the height and width are the logical canvas dimensions used for drawing and are different from the style.height and style.width CSS attributes. If you don’t set the CSS attributes, the intrinsic size of the canvas will be used as its display size; if you do set the CSS attributes, and they differ from the canvas dimensions, your content will be scaled in the browser. For example:

// Make a canvas that has a blurry pixelated zoom-in
// with each canvas pixel drawn showing as roughly 2x2 on screen
canvas.width  = 400;
canvas.height = 300; 
canvas.style.width  = '800px';
canvas.style.height = '600px';

See this live example of a canvas that is zoomed in by 4x.

var c = document.getElementsByTagName('canvas')[0];
var ctx = c.getContext('2d');
ctx.lineWidth   = 1;
ctx.strokeStyle = '#f00';
ctx.fillStyle   = '#eff';

ctx.fillRect(  10.5, 10.5, 20, 20 );
ctx.strokeRect( 10.5, 10.5, 20, 20 );
ctx.fillRect(   40, 10.5, 20, 20 );
ctx.strokeRect( 40, 10.5, 20, 20 );
ctx.fillRect(   70, 10, 20, 20 );
ctx.strokeRect( 70, 10, 20, 20 );

ctx.strokeStyle = '#fff';
ctx.strokeRect( 10.5, 10.5, 20, 20 );
ctx.strokeRect( 40, 10.5, 20, 20 );
ctx.strokeRect( 70, 10, 20, 20 );

body { background:#eee; margin:1em; text-align:center }
canvas { background:#fff; border:1px solid #ccc; width:400px; height:160px }

<canvas width="100" height="40"></canvas>
<p>Showing that re-drawing the same antialiased lines does not obliterate old antialiased lines.</p>