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Scaling SVG Clipping Paths for CSS Use

February 28th, 2017 Leave a comment Go to comments

A legit CSS trick documented by Eric Meyer!

So there is polygon() in CSS and in SVG. They are closely related, but there are all kinds of weirdnesses. For example, you can use path() in CSS to update the d attribute of a , but you can’t do the same with polygon() and .

Part of the problem is that polygon() in CSS only accepts numbers with units, like px, %, em, or whatever.

.clip-me {
  /* Works! */
  clip-path: polygon(50% 0, 100% 25%, 100% 75%, 50% 100%, 0 75%, 0 25%);

  /* Does NOT work */
  clip-path: polygon(50 0, 100 25, 100 75, 50 100, 0 75, 0 25);
}

Which is exactly the opposite in SVG:

<svg>
  /* Works! */
  <polygon points="50 0, 100 25, 100 75, 50 100, 0 75, 0 25"></polygon>

  /* Does NOT work */
  <polygon points="50px 0px, 100px 25px, 100px 75px, 50px 100px, 0px 75px, 0px 25px"></polygon>
  <polygon points="50% 0%, 100% 25%, 100% 75%, 50% 100%, 0px 75%, 0% 25%"></polygon>
</svg>

The trick is that you can force the SVG coordinates to behave like percentage coordinates (even with weird viewBoxes) with some light math, a transform attribute, and a special clipPathUnits attribute.

<svg viewBox="0 0 329.6667 86">
  <clipPath id="cloud02" clipPathUnits="objectBoundingBox"
   transform="scale(0.003033 0.0116279)">
    <path d="…(coordinates go here)…"/>
  </clipPath>
</svg>

Those two values are 1/329.6667 and 1/86, respectively, and they effectively scale every point in the d attribute to fit into the needed 0–1 range. Thus we have an SVG clipping path that scales with the element and fits to its dimensions!

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Scaling SVG Clipping Paths for CSS Use is a post from CSS-Tricks

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