Thanks for this great and useful library. I wanted to point out a potential problem with the GradientText widget: It requires users to set a fixed Rect which is then going to be used to determine the size of the shader. However, especially with dynamic texts, we often don't know what size to use here. It would be great if we had the option to instead use a rect that is as big as the text to draw.
Solution
The built-in widget ShaderMask can solve this for us: It will dynamically give us a rect obtained by measuring the child widget during layout. We can make advantage of this by just using that rectangle to create the shader. In this PR, I thus make the shaderRect optional for GradientText. If a shaderRect is provided, that size will always be used. Otherwise, the dynamic size of the text will be used instead.
Backwards-compatibility
These changes should be backwards compatible because the look doesn't change provided a non-null shaderRect was given. This does change the appearance when that parameter was force-set to null before, as the previous behavior was to use a fixed rect in that case.
The design of the example page has also changed because I removed the shaderRect parameter, which was different from the actual text size. If this is not desirable, changing it back to Rect.fromLTWH(0.0, 0.0, 50.0, 50.0) will make the text appear like it did before.
bluemix
commented
5 years ago
Problem
Thanks for this great and useful library. I wanted to point out a potential problem with the
GradientTextwidget: It requires users to set a fixedRectwhich is then going to be used to determine the size of the shader. However, especially with dynamic texts, we often don't know what size to use here. It would be great if we had the option to instead use a rect that is as big as the text to draw.Solution
The built-in widget
ShaderMaskcan solve this for us: It will dynamically give us a rect obtained by measuring the child widget during layout. We can make advantage of this by just using that rectangle to create the shader. In this PR, I thus make theshaderRectoptional forGradientText. If ashaderRectis provided, that size will always be used. Otherwise, the dynamic size of the text will be used instead.Backwards-compatibility
These changes should be backwards compatible because the look doesn't change provided a non-null
shaderRectwas given. This does change the appearance when that parameter was force-set tonullbefore, as the previous behavior was to use a fixed rect in that case. The design of the example page has also changed because I removed theshaderRectparameter, which was different from the actual text size. If this is not desirable, changing it back toRect.fromLTWH(0.0, 0.0, 50.0, 50.0)will make the text appear like it did before.