Manzanita Research

Twenty Pretext Demos

We built these to explore pretext, Cheng Lou's text layout engine. Pure arithmetic, zero DOM reads, instant reflow. What happens when text becomes a material you can play like an instrument?

01

The Gutenberg Variations

Drag a slider from 1440 to 2026 and watch a single article reflow through 600 years of typographic history at 60fps.

Layout
02

Concrete Poetry Machine

Type a sentence and it flows into the shape of its own meaning. "River" becomes sinuous, "cage" becomes bars, "heart" becomes a heart.

Interactive
03

The Rosetta Engine

Latin, Arabic, and Chinese reflow simultaneously around a draggable stone. Three scripts solving the same spatial problem differently.

Multilingual
04

Text Tectonics

Two paragraphs drift, collide, and subduct like tectonic plates. Mountains form at the collision zone. Typography gets geology.

Physics
05

Phonetic Topography

Audio reshapes the paragraph in real time. Frequency bands become line widths. Play a song and watch the text dance to it.

Audio
06

The Panopticon Reader

Text pools where you look and dissolves into letter-soup in your periphery. Your fovea is smaller than you think.

Interactive
07

Babel Sieve

Words have mass proportional to their width. They fall through oscillating typographic slots. Short words drain like sand; long words dam up.

Physics
08

Cymatics Typograph

Audio drives Chladni nodal patterns. Text flows into the calm zones like sand on a vibrating plate, forming word-mandalas at 60fps.

Audio
09

The Jacquard Text Loom

Weave text on a browser-based loom. Warp and weft are characters interlacing according to a punch card pattern you draw.

Interactive
10

Mycelium Messenger

Words flow through a procedurally generated fungal network, branching and merging through channels that grow in real time.

Interactive
11

Labanotation Choreography

Text performs a 1928 dance notation score. Paragraphs waltz, leap, pirouette, and pas de deux, reflowing mid-movement.

Layout
12

The Flinch

Text about trust that recoils from your cursor. Move fast and it flinches. Hold still and it cautiously creeps back.

Interactive
13

A Treated Document

Live procedural erasure poetry. Words vanish under black marker strokes. What survives reflows into accidental poems.

Layout
14

Babel Columns

Three columns in English, Arabic, and Chinese, adversarially coupled. Where one widens, the others narrow. Same content, disagreeing bodies.

Multilingual
15

Planetary Pulse

Climate data written into the shape of the text itself. Each line is one year. Wider lines mean a warmer planet.

Layout
16

Babel Drift

Text streams in four languages drift and collide. At the boundaries, characters interleave into pidgin. Real-time glottogenesis.

Multilingual
17

Soma Text

Biofeedback typography. Your webcam detects motion and proximity. Hold still and the text calms. Move and it fractures.

Webcam
18

Ouroboros

Text that describes its own layout. Resize the container and it rewrites itself to stay true. A fixed-point equation at 60fps.

Meta
19

The Tower of Babel

Words in five languages fall, stack, and build a tower. Mass proportional to width. The tower always eventually collapses.

Physics
20

The Rosetta Runtime

A programming language whose source code IS its visual output. Write "circle 120" and the text flows around a circle. Quine meets InDesign.

Meta