Liquid Text
| Obviously moving the shape(s) that the text avoids makes for some fairly unreadable text. But it works great for creating a flowing text output where the shapes are unmoving, or moving only slightly. |
LiquidText is a class that lets you wrap dynamic text around any number of irregular shapes. And those shapes can be moving!
To download the LiquidText.as file go to FlashDen.net.
Here are some examples:
Poetry: Text flowing around an irregular shape as the user scrolls the text up and down.
Circle in a circle: Not only is the text placed inside of a circle but the inner circle can be dragged around while the text re flows around it.
Circles in a circle: same as above but with 3 inner circles.
History
Ask anyone. It is not possible to make text flow around a shape - other than a rectangle - in Flash. You also can’t do it in HTML. You can do it in Photoshop/Illustrator but that isn’t exactly dynamic.
That really bothered me. It seemed to me that there should be a solution for this. I knew that the Flash player wasn’t built with that capability because I had asked Bentley Wolfe, Senior Support Engineer for the Flash player at Adobe. (Cool guy by the way who undoubtedly thinks I’m a nut case).
So, while attending FlashForward 2006 in Seattle the solution came to me. I spent my evenings after the conference working on the code and was able to get it working by the last day of the conference so that I could show Bentley. (Actually, that would be “show off” to Bentley.)
If you would like to see this working for yourself then use the links below. Note: it takes a lot of cycles to place the text so it may run slow on your machine. Just give it a moment to finish its work when you move things around.
