Charles Petzold



Text Morphing but with Decomposed Outlines

November 13, 2009
New York, N.Y.

I'm not quite sure how to describe this Silverlight program. It contains two text strings of approximately equal linegth for which I've generated flattened PathGeometry objects using a WPF program I've described in a previous blog entry. The character outlines of each text string thus consist of a series of tiny lines. By animating these little lines back and forth between the two outlines, the text strings seem to morph into each other, but in a rather unusual way.


DecompositionComposition.html

Through a little finagling, the program equalizes the number of lines that comprise the outlines of each text string. There are 832 lines, and hence 1664 PointAnimation objects going at once. (I've used a BackEase easing function so the animation overshoots the mark and then returns for another interesting effect.) Despite the large number of animations, it seems to run remarkably smoothly — at least on my machine. Here's the source code.