Letters That Clip What Follows Them

A headline filled with a photograph, a word with a texture running through its letters, a stamp whose lettering lets the paper show through: each is the same trick. The letters of a word are laid down first, and whatever is drawn after them shows only inside their outlines. The word is not a picture cut out by hand; it stays text, set in its font, and it can still be searched for and copied.

The page sets the word Ink four times, and each time lays stripes across it afterwards. The first word is filled, the second only outlined, the third filled and outlined; the fourth is not painted at all, so only the stripes show, in the shape of its letters. Every stripe runs across the whole word, and everything outside the letters falls away.

What This Example Shows

A word whose letters clip whatever is drawn after it.
The word filled, outlined, both, or not painted at all.
Text that stays text, set in its font.

The Source Code, Complete

Nothing is left out and nothing is simplified: this is the program exactly as it runs, for the developer who uses this library.

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The Document Itself

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Examples Near This One

Breaking a Paragraph up, and Aligning It

A paragraph broken into lines, then laid out four ways: left, right, centred, justified.

Breaking an Overlong Word

A word longer than the column that holds it: the library leaves it whole, cuts it at the column's edge, or cuts it and closes the line on a hyphen.

Soft Hyphens and No-Break Spaces

A justified column set twice: the long words breaking at their soft hyphens with a hyphen shown, or left whole, and a figure a no-break space keeps together.

Break Points After a Slash or a Hyphen

A justified column set four times: file paths and compounds running past the edge with no break points, wrapping where a break after a slash or a hyphen is allowed, then wherever their punctuation allows one, and last with no-break hyphens that keep each compound whole.

A Report That Lays Itself Out

A title, a rule, two paragraphs, a heading, a table of twenty-six rows and a footnote, handed over in reading order and broken across two pages by the engine.

A Stack Laid out by Hand, One Box at a Time

A delivery slip poured into two boxes, the second taking up where the first stopped, and a poster whose picture no box can hold, each box saying what became of the stack in it.

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