Patent ID: 7924285

Claim:
In a computing environment, a method for individually animating text elements at an author-selected level of granularity, the method comprising: receiving information indicating that part of a text object model is to be animated, the part of the text object model to be animated at a user-definable granularity of text elements, and the part of the text object model to be animated comprising a set of consecutive text elements; subsequent to receiving the information indicating that part of the text object model is to be animated, identifying text to render; binding the identified text to the text object model; laying out the page containing the animated text elements; laying out the line containing the animated text elements; laying out the text object model by producing a glyph animation property for the part of the text object model to be animated and attaching the glyph animation property to a character run in a layout tree, the glyph animation property being associated with the part of the text object model to be animated and independent of actual text characters to be animated, a non animated part of the text object model being associated with a character run in the layout tree having no glyph animation property; and at rendering time, generating a separate glyph run for each run of glyphs having a distinct associated glyph animation property and applying the associated glyph animation property to each glyph run, and rendering each glyph run to a display device.