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?
Drag a slider from 1440 to 2026 and watch a single article reflow through 600 years of typographic history at 60fps.
Type a sentence and it flows into the shape of its own meaning. "River" becomes sinuous, "cage" becomes bars, "heart" becomes a heart.
Latin, Arabic, and Chinese reflow simultaneously around a draggable stone. Three scripts solving the same spatial problem differently.
Two paragraphs drift, collide, and subduct like tectonic plates. Mountains form at the collision zone. Typography gets geology.
Audio reshapes the paragraph in real time. Frequency bands become line widths. Play a song and watch the text dance to it.
Text pools where you look and dissolves into letter-soup in your periphery. Your fovea is smaller than you think.
Words have mass proportional to their width. They fall through oscillating typographic slots. Short words drain like sand; long words dam up.
Audio drives Chladni nodal patterns. Text flows into the calm zones like sand on a vibrating plate, forming word-mandalas at 60fps.
Weave text on a browser-based loom. Warp and weft are characters interlacing according to a punch card pattern you draw.
Words flow through a procedurally generated fungal network, branching and merging through channels that grow in real time.
Text performs a 1928 dance notation score. Paragraphs waltz, leap, pirouette, and pas de deux, reflowing mid-movement.
Text about trust that recoils from your cursor. Move fast and it flinches. Hold still and it cautiously creeps back.
Live procedural erasure poetry. Words vanish under black marker strokes. What survives reflows into accidental poems.
Three columns in English, Arabic, and Chinese, adversarially coupled. Where one widens, the others narrow. Same content, disagreeing bodies.
Climate data written into the shape of the text itself. Each line is one year. Wider lines mean a warmer planet.
Text streams in four languages drift and collide. At the boundaries, characters interleave into pidgin. Real-time glottogenesis.
Biofeedback typography. Your webcam detects motion and proximity. Hold still and the text calms. Move and it fractures.
Text that describes its own layout. Resize the container and it rewrites itself to stay true. A fixed-point equation at 60fps.
Words in five languages fall, stack, and build a tower. Mass proportional to width. The tower always eventually collapses.
A programming language whose source code IS its visual output. Write "circle 120" and the text flows around a circle. Quine meets InDesign.
Draw any shape — blob, wave, spiral — and text pours into it like water. Drag control points and the text reflows every frame. CSS Exclusions, but it actually works.
AI chat streaming with zero layout shift. The pretext side predicts height before text renders. The DOM side janks. Side by side, the difference is devastating.
Drag a magnifying loupe across text. Under the glass, text reflows at 2x size with wider spacing. Every surrounding line recalculates its breaks in real time.
Drag sliders for line width, height, and spacing — text reflows at 60fps until it feels right. Accessibility presets for dyslexia, low vision, and dense reading. Comfort is a spectrum, not a menu.
Paste text and see every orphan, bad rag, and awkward break highlighted in real time. Resize the container and watch warnings appear and disappear.
A government memo with a classification slider. Slide between Public and Top Secret — content reveals, redaction bars shrink, and the entire document reflows at 60fps.
After Karl Gerstner. A sea-voyage narrative whose typography is generated by its own content. Arguments get louder in type. Whispers shrink. Journalism becomes columns. The form is not designed — it is a programme.
Type text and watch it find its own shape. Pretext tests 60 container widths in 0.04ms, scoring each for rag quality and orphans. The container adapts to the content, not the other way around.