Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#2I prefer Font Bomb
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#3I prefer Font Bomb http://fontbomb.ilex.ca/
In case you're unaware: Font Bomb is a (gimmicky) solution for literally "blowing up" text. Blast.js, in comparison, is a robust text parser for real-world typographic manipulation.
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#4I prefer Font Bomb http://fontbomb.ilex.ca/
In case you're unaware: Font Bomb is a (gimmicky) solution for literally "blowing up" text. Blast.js, in comparison, is a robust text parser for real-world typographic manipulation.
We changed the title to the first sentence of the article, which makes this clearer.
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#5This is wonderful! I see immediate use cases for drop-in username highlighting, without additional templating or '' + username + '' spaghetti.
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#6Big fan of your Velocity.JS, Julian. How does Blast.JS compare to Lettering.JS? (http://letteringjs.com/)
Edit: It's been awhile since I've looked at Lettering, but to answer my own question, Lettering only splits on individual letters, while Blast allows for user-definable splits.
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#7Big fan of your Velocity.JS, Julian. How does Blast.JS compare to Lettering.JS? ( http://letteringjs.com/ ) Edit: It's been awhile since I've looked at Lettering, but to answer my own question, Lettering only splits on individual letters, while Blast allows for user-definable splits.
Thanks for the kind words!
Lettering.js has a slightly smaller footprint and aims to be a dead-simple "wrap spans around each letter/word in the HTML element I point you at." Accordingly, it discards your HTML then dumbly splits using spaces as delimiters. Because of this, you have to use Lettering.js in silo'd portions of your page where you don't mind losing HTML and event handlers. Further, its lack of UTF-8/multilingual text parsing means that it's only suitable for English, and only in controlled portions of your page where you already know exactly how text is written out.
Blast, in comparison, tries to be a "set it and forget it" library. Point it at anything, blast it apart, then even reverse what you've done ($el.blast(false);). You can apply it to user-generated text in real-time and not worry about a thing.
Perhaps most important, though, is that Blast.js features a sentence delimiter plus search, which Lettering.js does not.
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#8You may want to change the size of the 6 on the IE6 logo. I had to copy and paste it into a new tab to tell what number it was.
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#9This might be interesting to people who are into this library. I've been working on a JS library that allows for manipulation of CSS properties on a character by character or a word by word basis. You can even use math functions for interesting effects (like applying a Cos function to font size character by character). The library is finished (and there is even a simple GUI) though I'm still working on documentation and examples. You can check it out here: https://github.com/emluque/generativeText
Re: Show HN: Blast.js separates text for typographic manipulation
#10Nice work. I'm also a fan of velocity.js (and I wrote liquid-fire to make it easier to use velocity in Ember apps).
My top use case for something like blast is applying typographic rules that aren't possible with CSS. Like adding extra letter-spacing to strings of all caps, and rendering "AM" and "PM" in small caps. I do several of these things already on an ad-hoc basis.