🚀 go-pugleaf

> Disintigrating Internet Infrastruture."  The essay was about a paragraph
> long, and by the time you read 2/3 of the way through it, you began to
> notice the letters in the text beginning to fall to the bottom of the
> window.  That website moved from URL to URL and I can no longer find it.

Sounds interesting, but I've never seen it.  Actually I'm more 
interested in what the text contained than in the animation effects.

> It seems the best way is to create an image of an alphabet in PhotoShop,
> make the background transparent, and cut it up into individual letter
> .bmps.  Then reconstruct the text back on the screenusing one image for
> each character

Wow!  You'll be wasting not only your time but especially, the user's 
memory.  The font can be easily made transparent using the TBrush::Style 
property.  There's no need for bitmap letters or anything:

   Canvas->Brush->Style = bsClear;
   Canvas->TextOut(10, 10, "Completely Transparent");

Good luck!

-- 
Yoto Yotov

Yoto Yotov <yoto@NOSPAMgmx.fr> wrote in message
news:MPG.15df4ae171cdb1479896c2@newsgroups.borland.com...

> Sounds interesting, but I've never seen it.  Actually I'm more
> interested in what the text contained than in the animation effects.

I think the contents of the text were there only to support the animation
effects: to hook you on reading something that seems serious and important
and then by performing what the text says, to create a Haiku-like "artwork."

> Wow!  You'll be wasting not only your time but especially, the user's
memory.  The font can be easily made transparent using the TBrush::Style
property.
>There's no need for bitmap letters or anything:
>
>    Canvas->Brush->Style = bsClear;
>    Canvas->TextOut(10, 10, "Completely Transparent");

WOW, that works great!  So now I have the following code that moves two
sentences across the screen and allows them to pass through (over) one
another without any problems:

int d=0;

__fastcall TForm1::TForm1(TComponent* Owner)
   : TForm(Owner)
{
Form1->Canvas->Brush->Style = bsClear;
}

void __fastcall TForm1::TimerDropTimer(TObject *Sender)              // Text
drops 150 pixels using Timer:
{
   d++;
   if (d>1) {
      Form1->Canvas->Font->Color=clBtnFace;
// we want to erase the previous text - the form is color clBtnFace
      Form1->Canvas->TextOut(150, d-1, "Watch me drop.");
   }
   Form1->Canvas->Font->Color=clBlack;
// we want to render the new text in clBlack
   Form1->Canvas->TextOut(150, d, "Watch me drop.");
   if (d==300) Form1->TimerDrop->Enabled=false;
}

And so on with another timer for another sentence moving diagonally across
the screen...
The buttons enable each timer separately or simultaneiously...

There is a limit to how fast this can be rendered.  Setting the timer
interval any faster than about 100ms has no discernable effect.

To create a "falling text" effect, using one timer for each letter (or set
of letters) in the essay seems equally wasteful.   Creating a timer for each
character or set in the text (assuming a text of 100 or 500 letters) would
be a humongous task.  But for the sake of argument, can you run 100-500
timers simultaneously without them "bumping" into one another?  How many
timers can you run together, practically speaking?

I would guess the way to go is to use one timer and have each character (or
set) respond to its cadence.  I suppose I could enter the complete text and
write code to parse the string into individual characters and assign each to
an individual rendering schedule.

The desired effect is that a few letters fall off the page at random in the
beginning, and then progressively more letters begin to fall as time goes
on.  Each character should accelerate as it falls (which the code above does
not accomplish) so I'll have to look into my physics textbook again.

Thanks again,
Nick