Question

I want to create an animation in which text is written to the screen as though one were following the action of a pen, in real time. Ideally, the bezier line points of a given font would be translated on the fly and then a string could be “drawn” character by character.

Has anyone done anything like this, and if so… how?

Answer 1

I suggest having a look at font parsers in as3:

• one is on libspark
• there is a font tool from the Five3D engine that turns a font to a class
• Sephiroth’s font parser seems pretty cool.

Once you do that you need to work out how are you going to traverse the paths inside each letter, what do you do for characters that have gaps, etc?

It sounds like you are trying to create a fancy animation.

In theory, yes, it should be possible, but in practice it’s up to you it it’s worth the trouble (input vs output)

UPDATE

Instead of parsing the font and getting pin point locations, you could:

• take a BitmapData copy of the text
• make it binary( as in for each pixel
  that is above 50% gray make it white,
  otherwise make it black )
• apply a convolution filter to detect
  the edges and use that.

Also, you could get away with something somewhat cheaper but effective. There are quite a few particle engines these days you could use:

• Flint Particles
• Seb Lee Delisle’s AS3 Particles
• Stardust

HTH