Have you ever found yourself wanting to use a simple SVG path in OpenGL or another graphics library? As the object shall be solid 2D, you need to generate a triangle mesh from the path, of course with holes being possible. That's exactly what this JavaScript code does, with the help of the amazing Triangle library.

First, run npm install to build the underlying Triangle library from C/C++ source and to install all dependencies, then process a demo file with a command like node index.js demo/person.svg. This project automatically detects the only path in this SVG file and outputs a JSON object containing a vertices attribute, which is a long list of 3D coordinates (the z-coordinate is always 0). That list of vertices may, for example, be used as a vertex buffer together with GL_TRIANGLES.

This project has only been used and tested on Linux. I'd be happy to hear reports about how it works on Windows or Mac. Additionally, all SVG files this project has been tested with have been generated by Inkscape, so files created by programs using other conventions may not work.

The following is an image, rendered using WebGL, that contains nine SVG paths which have been converted to triangles using this project.

The initial SVG path data is pipelined through several stages, which are explained in the following.

1. Read the file and parse its XML using xml2js.
2. Find all <path> elements in the resulting structure. If there is only one, use it, otherwise ask the user to specify the desired path's id attribute as an additional command-line argument.
3. Parse the path's d attribute using parse-svg-path. This will, for example, turn 'm1 2 l3 4' into [['m',1,2], ['l',3,4]].
4. Convert this information into a more verbose version of itself. For example, turn [['c',1,2,3,4,5,6], ['L',7,8]] into

[
  {
    "positioning": "relative",
    "type": "curveto",
    "controlBegin": [1,2],
    "controlEnd": [3,4],
    "dest": [5,6]
  },
  {
    "positioning": "absolute",
    "type": "lineto",
    "dest": [7,8]
  }
]

5. Make all coordinates be absolute, i.e. follow relative coordinates and update them accordingly.
6. Convert all curveto entries into straight lines, i.e. evaluate the underlying cubic bezier curves. By default, five points are generated for each curve.
7. Correct all coordinates to lay inside the range between 0 and 1. The aspect ratio is kept, and only the "longer" dimension of the path (regarding the axis-aligned bounding box) will reach 1.
8. Split the verbose path on entries with type closepath. Use the first subpath as the main, surrounding path and treat the others as holes inside the main one. As Triangle needs single points inside each hole, use a simple algorithm to find them.
9. Eventually, call the triangulate function of Triangle (which is easily callable from JavaScript, as it has been wrapped inside a N-API module). The returned object contains pointlist and trianglelist attributes. Indices into pointlist, three for each triangle, are resolved and the final object is written to stdout. Note that the coordinates of triangles output by Triangle are always in counter-clockwise order, so make sure to possibly consider face culling here.