After the scalable one-line typewriter and the crazy "scrabble"-writer let's do another one: The multi-line typewriter.
A CSS-only solution of course:
The effect relies on using a Monospace font and knowing the number of characters. Yes, I am starting with the drawbacks but that was the price for a generic and easy-to-use code.
The HTML is very basic:
This is a <span class="type" style="--n:53">CSS only solution for a multi-line typewriter effect.</span>
A span with our text and the number of characters as a variable.
For the CSS:
.type {
font-family: monospace;
color:#0000;
background:
linear-gradient(-90deg,#00DFFC 5px,#0000 0) 10px 0,
linear-gradient(#00DFFC 0 0) 0 0;
background-size:calc(var(--n)*1ch) 200%;
-webkit-background-clip:padding-box,text;
background-clip:padding-box,text;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
animation:
b .7s infinite steps(1),
t calc(var(--n)*.3s) steps(var(--n)) forwards;
}
@keyframes t{
from {background-size:0 200%}
}
@keyframes b{
50% {background-position:0 -100%,0 0}
}
A few lines of CSS code with no hard-coded values. We only need to update the variable --n.
How does it work?
The trick relies on background properties so as a reference I always recommend this article:
We have two background layers. The first layer will color the text and the second one will create the blinking caret.
The idea of the first layer is to apply a discrete animation of background-size to create a filling effect from the first character to the last one using a gradient coloration.
Here is a step-by-step illustration to understand the trick:
The second layer is our caret. Here we will perform two animations. The first one is a background-size animation similar to the text coloration since the caret needs to follow the text. The second one is a background-position animation to create the blinking effect.
Another step-by-step to understand:
The width of the caret is controlled by the 5px inside the gradient and we add a small offset (10px) to avoid having an overlap with the text animation.
That's it! Simply imagine both layers animating at the same time and we have our CSS-only typewriter effect.
✔️ No Javascript
✔️ A basic HTML code
✔️ No complex CSS code. Less than 10 declarations and no hard-coded values
✔️ Accessible. The text is written within the HTML code (no pseudo-element, no duplicated text)
❌ Require a monospace font
⚠️ You can use any text without changing the code but you have to update one variable
Top comments (18)
Love this one, I can't spot it but on iPhone (again...damned apple) it only shows the first two lines and then stops? Is it the background clip not behaving itself?
I only think that as the cursor position works correctly, I could be wrong!
yes it's the background-clip:text working only for the first line of the span. Safari and IOS have a lot of issues with background-clip:text
so how can we do for safari and IOS.
Did you ever find a fix for this? experiencing the same issue
This one's really helpful and I will surely try this, the explanation was also great.
Hi @afif , thank you very much for this guide. It was really useful!
I'm trying to implement a version of this in a personal project, and i needed a responsive, multi-line typewriter effect, and this fits very nicely.
However, i am having a bit of a problem. I am not sure if this is a bug or me not having understood your guide well enough, but when i try to do it the steps dont seem to match the characters. Characters get chopped up weirdly.
I made a sandbox with an example implementation of my code. I tried even hardcoding the text length, the time and the text to display and the bug is still there. Its more visible on longer texts.
If you could take a look at it and see if you can spot the bug, i would really appreciate it. n.n
here's the sandbox: codesandbox.io/s/buggy-typewriter-...
You are changing the animation, this won't work. Check my code to see the background-size definition I am using. It depends on the text length
background-size:calc(var(--n)*1ch) 200%;You need to keep this. Same for the duration, it look like this:calc(var(--n)*.3s)Thanks for replying Afif!
I re-implemented the background and the calcs, but that was not the problem.
It turns out that the problem were my modification to the animations.
I wrote:
@keyframes typeText {
from {
background-size: 0 200%;
}
to {
background-size: 100% 200%;
}
}
and commenting out the to{} fixed it. I seem to have misunderstood what the animation does exactly.
additionally, another bug is that i was using japanese characters or emojis, which seem to not work very well with monospace fonts...
Anyways, thanks again for the typewriter effect! i love it
Hey! This is great. I have been trying to implement it on text under a tag, but I am having some difficulties. That's the best I got: codepen.io/Luca-Marco-Pappalardo/p.... Basically the link text is not animated in sequence, the other best outcome I had was for the text to remain black and not be animated at all. Any idea on how ti fix this?
So I messed around with your code as it would just print everything on a single line and not create a new line depending on the size of the window, so I added work-break: break-all to the bottom of the .type id and now it automatically prints to the next line regardless of window size. I hope this helps to improve upon your non-JS CSS typewriter creation
Respect!
Nice! Good job!
Good, how do you link the posts?
by creating a serie. You can find this setting next to the publish button
Oooh! I need to make mine a series too... next one coming this evening.
Nice, tks!
Nice. I really like this one and the whole explanation. A+.
This can be great if you use it with javascript to calculate the length of text and update the variable. The code can be simple.