Something close to releasable .....

Too much of this stuff will give you
a headache

I must figure out a way of saving videos from the Simulator.

Anyway, this is sort of releasable, a version 0.1 alpha, or as Microsoft would call it 'bug free final release'. It needs commenting more and documenting better, well at all :)

Also, I think I'll make it so it reads the .fnt file in directly rather than parsing it separately. And it needs a better demo than what I have here (latest state of my testing)

You can't really see it here, but the top curve is oscillating, the middle word 'pulse' is highlighting each letter in turn by blowing it up, and 'Another one' is wobbling.

These are standard effects (except for pulse) - there is a fourth at the bottom right as well.

All of these are being transitioned.to ; one of the pleasant surprises is that you can scale a view and its parts independently, so the 'pulse' is being zoomed at the same time as the letters are.

The code to do this is not too long winded. The blue bits are usual Corona stuff ; the other four colours show the creation of four different strings.  The only thing that's unusual is the pulser() function.

It works out the current character by dividing the elapsed time in ms by 360 and making it in the range 1 .. length (the string length), that character (index identifies the character) then is scaled to 2,2. If you uncomment the modifier.rotation line it spends while it is highlighted which is nifty from a demo point of view but completely unreadable. It just bangs it out there x 2 at the moment but it wouldn't be hard to make it zoom.

The thing I like about this is you can do all kinds of utterly insane things with it if you want, but if you just want a simple effect there's a library of them (currently only about six of them)

The animate() methods tell it to animate - if you don't have this it just applies it once and leaves it, so you'd get a non moving curve on "Another demo curve" for example.

https://github.com/autismuk/Font-Manager

display.setStatusBar(display.HiddenStatusBar)

fm = require("system.fontmanager")

local str = fm.BitmapString:new("retrofont",48)

str:moveTo(160,240):setScale(2,2):setText("Another demo curve")
str:setModifier("curve"):animate(4)

local str2 = fm.BitmapString:new("font2",45):setDirection(270):setText("Bye!"):setAnchor(0,0):setScale(-1,1)

local str3 = fm.BitmapString:new("demofont",30):moveTo(160,400):setText("Another one"):setScale(2,2)

str3:setModifier("wobble")
str3:animate()

function pulser(modifier, cPos, elapsed, index, length)
local w = math.floor(elapsed/360) % length + 1
if index == w then 
modifier.xScale,modifier.yScale = 2,2
-- modifier.rotation = elapsed % 360
end
end

local str4 = fm.BitmapString:new("retrofont",80):setText("pulse"):moveTo(160,240):setModifier(pulser):animate()

local t = 8000
transition.to(str:getView(),{ time = t,rotation = 0, y = 100, xScale = 0.4,yScale = 0.7,onComplete = function() --[[ FontManager:clearText()--]] end })
transition.to(str2:getView(), { time = t,x = 300, y = 400, alpha = 0.4,xScale = 0.4,yScale = 0.4 })
transition.to(str3:getView(), { time = t,rotation = 360 })
transition.to(str4:getView(), { time = t, xScale = 2,yScale = 2})