canvas has inspired similar features in other graphical toolkits and even in web browsers via the <canvas> tag .
The Tk canvas lacks modern features such as antialiasing, and an alpha channel for transparency/translucency. These might be implemented in future versions of Tk - see Tk 9.0 WishList.
This page lists alternatives to the Tk canvas widget for 2D graphics. Some of these are really replacements for Tk itself, others use the feature set of the 3D library OpenGL but in a 2D mode.
[TkPath]: [zoom-canvas]: a pure-Tcm canvas extension. It provides a builtin interactive zoom&panning.
gilTclCanvas : The gilTclCanvas is a replacement for the Tk canvas. It works pretty much the same, but has three main differences:
See: 3dcanvas, Pdf canvas, Canvas3d, ClassyTk, DataflowCanvas, slate, pixmix, SlideDraw, Swank Canvas Widget, tkgcv, Paved Widgets, Pad++ , padgraph, XCircuit, POW Image/Plot Display , gcanvas