animate-textshadow

Update 2016: This library is no longer recommended for use in production - see here

A lightweight jQuery plugin to animate text shadows

animate-textshadow is a simple, lightweight (< 1KB minified + gzipped) jQuery plugin which lets you animate an element's text-shadow property, using jQuery's regular .animate method.

The plugin should work with all browsers that support the text-shadow property: Firefox 3.1+, Chrome 2+, Safari 1.1+ (untested), IE9+, limited Opera 9.5+ (see Known Issues below).

Demo

To view the plugin in action see http://www.alexpeattie.com/projects/animate-textshadow/

Usage

The plugin extends the .animate method to take a textShadow property.

$("#text").animate({textShadow: "#000 1px 2px 3px"})

The textShadow property is made up of a color, and 3 absolute lengths:

• right - governs how far to the right the shadow is offset. A negative value offsets the shadow to the left.
• bottom - governs how far below the text the shadow is offset. A negative value offsets the shadow above the text.
• blur - governs the blur radius of the shadow.

For more see the associated W3C spec.

The color can be in hex or RGB, the lengths can be in px, pt or em.

Requirements

jQuery 1.4+

Credits

Based on Edwin Martin's excellent Shadow animation plugin.

License

animate-textshadow is licensed under the MIT License:

Copyright (c) 2011 Alex Peattie (http://www.alexpeattie.com)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Known issues/forthcoming features

• A bug in Opera's implementation of getComputedStyle means it can't fetch an element's text-shadow. In Opera the plugin will just apply the new text-shadow value (no animation)
• Only a single shadow is currently supported
• All properties of text-shadow must be provided at the moment (contrary to the CSS spec)
• Future support for CSS3 units (e.g. rem, ex, ch)
• Possible future support for IE through filters.