kinetic_text 1.1.0

Kinetic typography for Flutter: letter, word and line motion from one shaped paragraph. Every letter moves whole; Arabic and Kurdish stay joined.

Changelog

1.1.0

• SheenMorph.sweepDirection. The sheen's physical sweep can now be set apart from the text's layout: ltr sweeps left to right, rtl right to left, mixed-script labels included. Exit and arrival both follow it, and the first sheen colour starts at its origin. Left null, each text keeps sweeping in its own reading order.

1.0.0

The engine is finished: every letter moves whole, every sweep reads the way its words do, and ten new effects.

Every letter moves whole

• Glyph-exact units. A glyph's ink does not stop at its box: the tail of a Kurdish ڕ and the V under it, an italic overhang, a stacked mark all reach into the next letter's box or below the line. Units used to be cut out along their boxes, so a moving letter lost those parts and left them behind on its neighbour (the shimmer artefact on ڕ). Now every unit is drawn from a class twin — the same paragraph laid out again with only one class of units inked — clipped to a generous cell, so a moving letter carries all of its ink and leaves none behind. The twins stack back into the original pixel for pixel; they are built lazily, the first time something moves, and a text at rest is still one plain paint.
• Ink passes are exact too. A tint, a sheen or a mask applies inside each moving letter's own layer, and over exactly the glyphs of its slice.
• Ligatures are one unit. Characters the font sets as one glyph (fi, a lam-alef) move together instead of each carrying half a glyph.
• Underlines and span backgrounds stay on the line under moving letters, drawn once and exactly; an ellipsis survives while a letter moves.

Direction and alignment from the text itself

• KineticText and TextMorph read in the text's own direction. With no textDirection given, a paragraph takes the direction of its first letter (the HTML dir="auto" rule): an English label on a Kurdish page reads left to right, its ! on the right; a Kurdish label on an English page right to left, aligned right. Text with no letter (a figure) follows the ambient Directionality. Pass textDirection to pin a label to the page.
• Every sweep follows the words it runs over. Shimmer, Spotlight, GradientInk (and its flow), Highlight, Underline, Wipe, Sway, the Typewriter cursor and the Outline trace take their direction from their own slice: a Kurdish word inside an English line shimmers right to left.
• SweepOrigin — reading (the default), end, left, right, center (out from the middle, two bands) and edges (in from both sides) — on Shimmer, Spotlight and Wipe.
• TextMorph.textAlign. alignment is now optional: when set it wins; otherwise textAlign (or the ambient DefaultTextStyle.textAlign) places each text — start by default, the start of that text's own direction.
• ShapedText.directionOf, ShapedText.readingDirectionOf, TextFrame.directionOf / readsRtl, InkPass.textDirection.

Better motion

• Outline traces in the text's own colour by default. color is now optional; colors runs the rings through a gradient along the reading order, Outline.rainbow() through every hue; fill: false leaves the text outlined. The trace turns clockwise for a left-to-right letter and anticlockwise for a right-to-left one.
• Shimmer lifts its letters from the baseline instead of swelling them about their middle; Bounce and Squeeze land on the baseline.
• Poses gained rotation, rotateX and rotateY (a 3D tilt seen in perspective) and a pivot (UnitPivot.center, baseline, top, bottom); poseMatrix exposes the transform.
• TickerText resamples a turning glyph through a matrix filter (smooth at any fraction of a pixel, like every other moving glyph), never clips a glyph to its slot, and turns Arabic-Indic (٠–٩) and Persian (۰–۹) digits on their own rings.

New effects

• Prism — the rainbow intro: letters rise in washed in the spectrum and settle into their own ink.
• Wipe — a soft edge uncovers the text, from any SweepOrigin.
• Flip — letters flip up in 3D perspective, about the baseline or about their middle.
• Tumble — letters drop in turned and land upright.
• Glow — a neon halo from a blurred copy of the ink; follows moving letters and any ink pass; still or breathing.
• Sway — letters swing on a pin, a beat apart.
• Shimmer.rainbow, Glint.rainbow, Outline.rainbow, and rainbowColors / colorAround for your own.
• paintGlyphsOf — draw a subset of a frame's letters, posed and inked (what Glow blurs).

Breaking

• paintUnit, paintResting and paintInk are gone; paintFrame, paintGlyphs and paintGlyphsOf draw frames, and ShapedText.paintUnits / paintExcept draw units exactly.
• ShapedText.cellOf now includes the overhang margin (ShapedText.overhang of a line height on every side).
• paintFrame translates its decor by origin as well as its glyphs.
• The default direction change above: pass textDirection: Directionality.of(context) where a label must follow the page.

0.3.0

• New: TextMorph.keepShared. True by default, as before: the letters the two texts share at their start and end stay put. Set it false to exchange every unit, so the old value leaves whole and the new one arrives whole; with unit: TextUnit.word a value swaps word by word, no letter left standing because it happened to match.

• New: TextMorph.rich. One line in several styles, a name in full ink and a code after it in a quieter one, morphed as one: each unit keeps its span's style while it moves, and the diff reads the plain text. A new style on the same words restyles in place without an exchange.

• TextMorph holds its leading edge. alignment now defaults to AlignmentDirectional.centerStart (was Alignment.center). Centred, each text rode the middle of a box whose width was easing between the two values, so a word sliding up or down also drifted sideways; pinned to the start it moves only on the morph's own axis, in LTR and RTL. Pass alignment: Alignment.center to keep a centred label centred.

0.2.0

• New: TickerText — an odometer figure. One continuous wheel per character slot, chasing its target with frame-rate-independent exponential smoothing; retarget mid-roll and the wheels redirect without a reset. Digits take the shorter way round the 0–9 ring, other characters turn one step; eased width, per-slot fade for characters that come and go, a text baseline, reduced-motion snap, TickerAnchor (right for figures, left for labels) and RollDirection (auto from the number in the text, up, down).
• MorphStyle.roll rebuilt on the same drum. The leaving and arriving glyphs turn over a cylinder on one clock — foreshortened and dimmed by their angle, fully off past the drum's window — instead of sliding under a band clip that left a sliver of the old glyph showing. New KineticEase.chase (the ticker's exponential settle). The travel parameter is gone.
• Moving letters are resampled, not re-placed. A posed unit is drawn at rest into a layer whose matrix image filter carries the pose (the trick behind Transform.filterQuality), so a 1 px drift or a 0.92→1 grow is smooth at any fraction of a pixel. Under a raw canvas transform Impeller snapped glyph y to whole pixels and re-rasterized the atlas at each scale, which made a slow Float or Glint step pixel by pixel. Settled text is still crisp vector text.
• Ten more effects. Reveals Bounce, Squeeze, Outline (a stroke sweeps round each letter from a stroked twin of the same paragraph, then the fill rises), Scramble; loops Wave, Pulse, Spotlight (the shimmer's band as an alpha mask in one ink pass, the line held at dim, an optional focus outline under the band), Flicker; morph styles fold (split-flap) and wipe.
• ShapedText.strokedTwin — the same layout with a stroked ink, cached.
• UnitPose.scaleY — a vertical squash effects can compose with scale.
• MorphStyle.exitEnd / enterStart — where each leg of a morph runs; the band-clip hook (clipToBand) is removed.

0.1.0

First release.

• KineticText — text shaped once, animated per grapheme, word or line. Rich runs (KineticText.rich) scope effects to one span.
• Reveals: Rise (cascade, fade, pop), Glint (sheen draw-on), Blur, Typewriter (with a blinking cursor).
• Loops: Shimmer (sheen sweep with a letter pop, reading-order aware for RTL), Sparkle, Float.
• Ink: GradientInk (incl. rainbow, static or flowing), Tint.
• Decor: Highlight (marker sweep), Underline and Underline.strike (draw-on).
• TextMorph — a label that rewrites itself in place; shared letters stay, changed letters exchange in sheen, slide, roll (odometer) or crossfade style; the width eases underneath.
• KineticController, external progress, replayKey, a cancellable delay, reduced-motion handling, stagger orders (reading, reverse, center, edges, scatter).
• Lays out like Text: a render object with intrinsic sizes, a text baseline, textAlign / maxLines / overflow / locale / strutStyle / textHeightBehavior, the ambient DefaultTextStyle and bold-text accessibility setting.
• Effects and morph styles compare by value; a rebuild never re-shapes.
• ShapedText, TextFrame, TextEffect — the engine is open for your own effects.