From time to time I see animated images in type specimens presenting VF. I guess this is usually done in Adobe AE, but I was wondering is there a simple tool where I can load my VF, type a word, set animation parameters and download it as a GIF?
For example,
Fontgauntlet by Dinamo has a pretty good base for this, with all parameters, animation types etc. I hope it wouldn't be much work from there to enable GIF download...
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The only VF plugin I know of for AE (VF not natively support) isn't great - I would surprised if much or any VF animations are made with AE these days. opportunity area for Adobe....
If so, a more effective way to animate the type is actually to animate the live VF fonts themselves. Of course, there are some technical challenges if you're not a coder, but I've occasionally run into pre-built code on GitHub. For example, I've coded this live animation into my website (scroll down the page to see it): https://maylett.net/cmd/miss-mable.html
Though there is no simple solution similar to what I wished for there are a few possible workarounds. And I appreciate having a quick overview of currently available options.
Samsa project offers animated SVG export, but after giving it a quick try I haven't managed to export a solid color word (only a single wireframe character).
Anyway, it would be great to have a very simple in-browser layout platform where one can perform a basic presentation of variable font and download it in universal format (GIF/SVG/MP4). So to set resolution, type text, run and set axis animations, and set background color or image. That would make it easier for type designers to quickly show previews on social networks etc.
Chrome will clean up the animation cache if the animation completes its iterations and an animation fill mode is enabled. Animation fill modes are not set by default, and if your animation is looping infinitely it will never reach the point where Chrome cleans up the cache. So I wrote the following function which enables a fill mode on all animations that autoplay, changes the infinite loop to a single iteration, and sets up an event listener that replays the animation the instant it finishes to simulate a loop. The result is an animation that appears to loop smoothly but is actually stopping for an instant to trigger the cache cleanup.
Did you have luck with this method on Chrome on Windows?