About the Options section

The Options section provides additional controls that influence how your text behaves on the animation page.

These aren’t animation settings in the traditional sense; instead, they offer extra features to randomize character appearance, enable sound effects and, on the Main page and Preview pages, show or hide interface elements and adjust how certain on‑page features behave.

These options let you fine-tune the overall experience of defining and previewing your animation.

Random Character Reveal

Random character reveal (all)

When enabled, all your animation settings still apply, but the characters appear in a completely random order instead of following the usual sequence.

The entire block of text is treated as one pool of characters, and each one is revealed at a random moment.

Random character reveal (per-line)

This option works the same way as Random character reveal (all), but the randomness is applied one line at a time. Characters in the first line appear in a random order, then characters in the second line appear in a random order, and so on.

This option is only meaningful when your text contains multiple actual lines — that is, lines separated by line breaks or paragraph breaks. Wrapped text (caused by the width of the Text Field or the Animation Page) still counts as a single line.

Disable the on-screen Info Cards

Many elements on the main Anitype page will display a blue info card when hovered with the mouse cursor.

If you find them annoying, or not longer need them, you can disable and enable the Info Cards in the Options section.

Select a typing sound effects

You can add sound effects to your animation that play in sync with the appearance of each character.

Open the drop-down menu and choose from more than 40 sounds, including classic typewriter clicks, iPhone‑style taps, sci-fi beeps, and more. When you play the animation, the selected sound will automatically synchronize with the character reveals.

Useful tips:

  1. Choose a realistic typing speed.
    The Type Delay setting controls how quickly characters appear. Lower values produce faster typing. For natural‑sounding results, delays in the range of 80–200 ms generally work best.
    • Around 80–120 ms feels like fast, confident typing.
    • Around 120–200 ms feels more like an average or slower typist.
    Very low values (below about 70 ms) tend to sound mechanical or rushed, and some sound effects may not sync well at those speeds.
  2. If the sound seems out of sync at the start, just replay.
    Occasionally, typewriter sounds may trigger too quickly on the first play. Press Play again and the audio will synchronize properly.

Show Buttons on Preview pages

This dropdown controls how the interface buttons are displayed on the two preview pages (the Animation Page and the Static Preview Page).

By default, all nine buttons are visible, but you can change their behavior depending on your workflow.

Available options:

  • Always
    The buttons are always visible on both preview pages.
  • Never (Use Esc to go back)

    The buttons are completely hidden. This is especially useful when using an external screen-recording software to capture your animation. It prevents the buttons from appearing in your capture and avoids the need to crop them out later in Shotcut. The built-in Anitype screen recorder ignores those buttons and also the mouse pointer.

    When using this mode, since you won't see the buttons, you will need to rely on their respective keyboard shorcuts. (see the Preview Pages section for details).

  • On cursor hover
    The buttons remain hidden until your cursor moves over their usual location. This keeps the preview area clean while still giving you quick access to the controls when needed.

Swipe Outro

Swipe Outro Speed

This dropdown controls how quickly characters are removed from the text when you use the Swipe Outro buttons on the Preview Pages.

The first option in the dropdown, Same as playback speed, matches the Type Delay value.

The remaining speeds range from Extremely slow to Supersonic (a very rapid 1‑millisecond removal), and finally Instant, which clears all text immediately.

Swipe Outro Mode

The two options in this dropdown determine the order in which characters are removed during the Swipe Outro effect.

  • Normal — Characters are removed from left to right or right to left, depending on which Swipe Outro button you click.
  • Random — Characters are removed in a completely random order.