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A Multi-line CSS only Typewriter effect

Temani Afif on September 02, 2021

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 cou...
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GrahamTheDev • Edited

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!

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Temani Afif

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

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Shyam3050

so how can we do for safari and IOS.

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Oliver McPheely

Did you ever find a fix for this? experiencing the same issue

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kayaks2fish

This one's really helpful and I will surely try this, the explanation was also great.

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Santiago Esmeral

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-...

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Temani Afif

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)

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Santiago Esmeral • Edited

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

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Luca • Edited

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?

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John Liter

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

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bbln

Respect!

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Jesus Liñan

Nice! Good job!

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Gustavo Scarpim

Good, how do you link the posts?

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Temani Afif

by creating a serie. You can find this setting next to the publish button

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Alvaro Montoro

Oooh! I need to make mine a series too... next one coming this evening.

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Gustavo Scarpim

Nice, tks!

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Alvaro Montoro

Nice. I really like this one and the whole explanation. A+.

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EronAlves1996

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.