Text Reveal By Glyph

Overview

Reveals text one character at a time. It creates the familiar typewriter effect from RPG dialogue boxes by switching visibility in a TextLayout. The downstream text_rasterize performs image rendering.

Usage tips

• The go-to chain is text_layout → text_reveal_by_glyph (promote progress to an input pin 📌 and connect time_source) → text_rasterize → animation_render.
• For crisp character-by-character steps, drive progress with steps based on math_func(Floor). Smooth progress can make character timings look uneven.
• Limit the range with first_glyph / last_glyph for split effects such as revealing only the second half later.

Related nodes

• text_layout — required upstream
• text_animate_by_glyph — controls motion instead of visibility
• text_rasterize / text_outline — render to an image
• time_source — drives progress

How to think about it

• TextLayout is the structure describing where characters are.
• Text Reveal By Glyph decides which of those characters are shown.
• It does not create an image yet.
• Finish by rendering with TextRasterize or TextOutline.

About glyphs

• In v1, you can effectively treat a glyph as one character.
• Therefore, First Glyph = 0 means the first character and 1 means the second.
• Think of First Glyph / Last Glyph as character indices.

Behavior

• Only the range from first_glyph through last_glyph is revealed.
• Characters outside the range are hidden.
• With reverse = true, the same range reveals from the end.
• delay postpones the entire start. At 0.5, nothing appears until progress reaches halfway.
• A glyph already marked visible = false remains hidden after this node.

Progress

• progress is always normalized to 0..1.
• If 11 characters are selected between First Glyph and Last Glyph, one character step is 1 / 11 = 0.0909....
• Advance progress by this step to reveal one character at a constant interval.
• Using 0..1 rather than the character count makes the same animation controls easy to reuse when text length changes.

Inspector helper display

• Text Reveal Helper displays:
  • total character count,
  • character count in the selected range,
  • the one-character step for the selected range, and
  • the number of visible characters at the current progress.
• The upper limit of Last Glyph updates automatically to match the actual character count of the input TextLayout.
• Inspect glyph index / bbox for the output TextLayout under Text Layout (Debug) in the Inspector.

Examples

[Text Input] -> [Text Layout] -> [Text Reveal By Glyph] -> [Text Rasterize] -> [Preview]

[Text Input] -> [Text Layout] -> [Text Reveal By Glyph]
[TimeSource] ----------------------^ progress