🔠 React Native Skia Responsive Text

A library providing a wrapper for the React Native Skia Text component, offering features like user-friendly text alignment, efficient multiline text management, and straightforward text truncation.

Motivation

React Native Skia currently offers a rather limited API for rendering text. There's ongoing development to enhance text support in future releases, but this progress might still take some time until it's officially rolled out (please refer to this issue for more detail).

This lightweight library comes as a handy solution, providing a more straightforward API for managing text, similar to the React Native text API (a bit limited).

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Installation

Prerequisites

This library uses react-native-reanimated for text animations. To use the library, you have to install react-native-reanimated and react-native-skia first. Refer to these libraries documentation for installation details.

Installing the library

To install this library, run one of the following commands in your project's directory:

• installation with yarn:

yarn add react-native-skia-responsive-text

• installation with npm:

npm i react-native-skia-responsive-text

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Usage

Example

This example is very similar to the Text usage example from React Native Skia docs.

import { Canvas, useFont } from '@shopify/react-native-skia';
import { StyleSheet } from 'react-native';
import ResponsiveText from 'react-native-skia-responsive-text';

export default function UsageExample() {
  const font = useFont(require('../../assets/Poppins-Regular.ttf'), 16);

  if (!font) {
    return null;
  }

  return (
    <Canvas style={styles.fill}>
      <ResponsiveText font={font} text='Hello World!' width={50} />
    </Canvas>
  );
}

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  fill: {
    flex: 1
  }
});

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Properties

The ResponsiveText component accepts all the properties available to the `Text`` component from React Native Skia, while also introducing additional features. These include the ability to adjust text alignment, set the number of lines, and the ellipsize mode, among others.

Name	Type	Default	Required	Description
font	SkFont	-	yes	Font to use (React Native Skia doesn't require this property but ResponsiveText does in order to properly wrap text)
text	string	-	yes	Text to draw
x	number	0	no	Left position of the text
y	number	0	no	Top position the text
width	number	text line width	no	Width of the text component (isn't required but should be specified to properly render text)
height	number	text line height	no	Height of the text component (used only for the vertical alignment. Overflowing text is visible)
lineHeight	number	fontSize	no	Text line height
overflow	'hidden' | 'visible'	'visible'	no	React Native Text component is cropped to dimensions of the container. The ResponsiveText doesn't crop the overflowing content by default. To do this, set overflow to hidden.
horizontalAlignment	'center' | 'center-left' | 'center-right' | 'left' | 'right'	left	no	Text alignment in the X axis
verticalAlignment	'bottom' | 'center' | 'top'	top	no	Text alignment in the Y axis
numberOfLines	number	-	no	Maximum number of text lines (the overflowing text will be cropped to occupy at most numberOfLines lines)
ellipsizeMode	'clip' | 'head' | 'middle' | 'tail'	'tail'	no	Determines how the overflowing text will be truncated
color	string	#000000	no	The color of the text
backgroundColor	string	-	no	The color of the text background
animationSettings	AnimationSettings*	-	no	Text lines transition animation settings (on alignment, lineHeight, text height changes)
animationProgress**	SharedValue<number>	-	no	Custom animation progress (can be used instead of animationSettings)

*AnimationSettings type contains the following properties:

type AnimationSettings = {
  duration?: number;
  easing?: AnimationEasing;
  onComplete?: (finished?: boolean) => void;
};

**animationProgress allows animating text based on custom progress value (e.g. when the user scrolls some content, opens the bottom sheet, etc.). It makes it easy to animate text in sync with another animation.

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Animated properties

ResponsiveText accepts reanimated shared values for some of its properties. This makes it possible to update these values without having to re-render the component or create smooth animations of these properties.

The following properties can be passed as SharedValues:

• x,
• y,
• color,
• backgroundColor,
• lineHeight,
• horizontalAlignment,
• verticalAlignment

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Animations

Timing-based animations

Animations based on settings specified in the animationSettings property. By default, the ResponsiveText component is not animated. That means, every change of any property will be reflected without transition.

When animationSettings are specified, every change of ResponsiveText properties resulting in text lines position change (i.e. alignment, line height, text component height change) will be animated.

Example

https://github.com/MatiPl01/react-native-skia-responsive-text/assets/52978053/f6a1cffa-18ae-4ff1-9d27-4291f67dbbd0

* This recording was made in the demo app (see the Demo app section for more details)

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Progress based animations

Progress based animations are the alternative way to animate text. Instead of passing animationSettings property, you have to pass the animationProgress which is a reanimated shared value indicating the current transition progress.

Every progress transition starts from the current text position and animates text lines to the new target position (updated alignment).

How to properly create progress-based animations?

To create smooth text animations, you have to follow these rules:

1. Use reanimated shared values as horizontalAlignment and verticalAlignment instead of plain numbers (to ensure that there is no delay in updating alignment settings),
2. Update horizontalAlignment and verticalAlignment before updating the animationProgress (the animation to new alignment values will start when the animationProgress is modified),
3. Ensure that the animationProgress value is set to 0 before you start updating the progress (to start the animation from the current text position).

Example

https://github.com/MatiPl01/react-native-skia-responsive-text/assets/52978053/cde6401c-98a7-49b1-8e11-4e6457a8b80a

* This recording was made in the demo app (see the Demo app section for more details)

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Demo app

This repository contains an interactive demo application to demonstrate how the ResponsiveText component works. It shows similarities and differences between the React Native Text component implementation and the ResponsiveText from this library.

All animations settings are applied only to the ResponsiveText, because the React native Text is not animated.

Running the app

To run the example app, you need to clone the repository and install dependencies.

git clone react-native-skia-responsive-text
cd react-native-skia-responsive-text
yarn

You can start the example app using the following command.

yarn example start

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