Community Curated Open Source

Awesome Pretext

A curated directory of demos, games, tutorials, integrations, and creative experiments built with Pretext — Cheng Lou's 15KB zero-dependency text layout engine that uses Canvas measureText() instead of the DOM.

Community project — not affiliated with Cheng Lou or the official Pretext project. Submit a project →

20 community demos 3 external projects 8 articles & videos

Official

Games

Playable games built entirely with Pretext text-layout primitives.

Animations & Cinematic

Visual spectacles: ASCII art, particle effects, cinematic crawls — all typeset by Pretext.

Interactive & Playground

Hands-on sandboxes and interactive UI experiments.

Visual, Labs & Collections

Experimental bundles, editorial layouts, and creative explorations.

Somnai Pretext Demos

Bundle

Five polished demos: editorial engine, fluid smoke ASCII, justification comparison, variable typographic ASCII, and shrinkwrap showdown.

by somnai-dreams (Maxwell Ingham) BundleTypography

Alarmy Editorial Clock

Editorial

Multi-column editorial layout flowing around an animated analog clock.

by SmisLee ClockColumns

PreText Experiments

Lab

Eleven demos including Dragon animation, Anime Walk, Masonry layout, editorial engine, and variable ASCII art.

by qtakmalay DragonAnimeResearch

Pretext Explosive

Visual

Text that shatters — explosive particle effects powered by Pretext layout.

by SamiKamal MotionParticles

NEWAudio Lyric Visualizer

Audio + Visual

Beat-driven lyric animation synced to music — upload audio and watch Pretext-powered text dance to the rhythm.

by 0xtigerclaw AudioMusicCanvas

Singularity & Liquid Grid

Collection

Three experiments: black-hole text singularity, liquid dashboard grid, and draw-to-fill text vessels.

by progrmoiz CreativeUI

Illustrated Manuscript

Art

Medieval illuminated manuscript with an animated dragon and live text reflow.

by dengshu2 ArtMedieval

Text Flow Demo

Experiment

News-style flowing text layout with a comparison shim for benchmarking.

by MaiMcdull FlowNews

Sea of Words

Scene

Text as ocean waves — words flowing with wrap geometry in a Pretext canvas scene.

by Mukul-svg SceneCanvas

World Model Test

UI

Minimal world-model interface powered by DOM-free text measurement.

by CharlieGreenman UIExperiment

Face × Pretext

ML + Text

TensorFlow.js face tracking drives real-time Pretext typography (webcam required).

by sachinkasana TensorFlowFace

Benchmarks & Performance

DOM vs Pretext — side-by-side speed comparisons.

External Projects

Community demos hosted elsewhere.

AI & Chat UIs

Pretext's killer use case: knowing a streaming token's final width before the DOM sees it. Read more →

Writeups & Deep Dives

Videos

Submit a Project

Built something with Pretext? Open a PR on pretext-cool/awesome-pretext or email a link. We credit every creator.

Submission requirements: live URL · short description · your name/handle · (optional) source link