Blog - ✂️ - 04 - JSE - TextStyle

4th August 2025

Oooh, a new command!

-=-=-

It's a bit of a complex command because it has a whole set of different effects. (Command Help writeup coming later!)
But this is what I've been working on, today.

It started with a dream, last night, for a simple "hopping text" effect, which I thought would be easy enough to make.
TextHop, and then I though "maybe a recolour/rainbow command", and then I thought "Circle text seems useful", and before I knew it I was about to write about 10 different commands.
Hmmm.
Better, then, to create one "Effect" command, and dollop them all into that somehow.

TextStyle rolled off the tongue fairly well, so that was the name I went with.

The general command is...

TextStyle CenterX,CenterY,Text,"Style",Parameter A, Parameter B

Those last two parameters change depending on the "Style" you're going for, and that's the bit that's going to require a fair amount of explaining in the help file.

The current effects are
Hopper, hops the letters
Padding, adds padding between letters
Fingers, moves every other letter up, and every other other letter down
Bobble, bobs the letters up and down like they're on water
Ghost, exactly the same, except with bigger letters! OOoooh!
Pop, the letters grow until they pop back to being small
Tumble, the letters fall flat down, then tumble off again.
Breathe, the letters grow to twice their size, then back down, like they're breathing.
Orbit, the letters form a circle
Spiral, the letters form a spiral
Flicker, the letters flicker out, a bit like a flickering sign
Rainbow, the letters are all differently coloured
FontMix, the letters switch between different fonts
Jitter, the letters jitter around
Fold, the letters appear to fold in half (though, really, they're just scaling to 0%)
Slide, the letters slide in (or out) from the given direction
Direction, the letters are written in the requested direction.

Unfortunately, these can't be mixed. As nice as it would be to have a Rainbow Spiral, or Ghost Fingers, in order to keep this command as fast as I can, I've had to code each effect as its own unique for-loop, which has to pass through all the characters in the string, and draw them to the canvas.

If you know how Javascript Canvas Text things go..
....
Maybe go easy on this command

Once I was done with it, I asked Microsoft CoPilot for a few more suggestions, and it gave me a nice big list of possibilities, so .. expect a few more to be added before I'm properly done with this command.
In the meantime, though, I'd say it's a nice little command, and I'm sure it'll be of use, somewhere, maybe, perhaps..
Right?!

Hmm..

You can give it a play, here, but may need to refresh first to update your JSE version to v.3gjh
Writeup coming ... later!!

Seemingly Obligatory A.I. Disclaimer

Microsoft CoPilot A.I. was used in a minor way during the development of this new command, but only insofar as it made a few handy suggestions for extra effects I could pull off.
For the most part, it was thinking with an Object Orientated mindset, and .. well, this is oldskool BASIC, so about 95% of its suggestions were completely unworkable.
"What about a 'snake' command, where the text can play a game of snake in the background?"
.. How's that gonna work?! How!?

It also coded me a handy "Take an RGB value and rotate the hue" function for the Rainbow effect, though, which is super useful. I'll have to add it to the main JSE command set, but I'm really not sure what to call it, or how best to make it work.
SetColourRGBRotated(r,g,b,alpha,rotation)
.. hmm..
Suggestions in the Comments/Discord!