Train Matrix is a jQuery plugin that converts letters into a matrix like those used on old First Great Western trains. The text remains selectable and displays without styles. It was inspired by an article on Ministry of Type by Aegir Hallmundur. Aegir has mocked up the matrix and alphabet in Illustrator.
Train Matrix is relatively light, it only uses one 3KB image, and the minified css and javascript together come to 16KB. This is still a very early version, but you can download the source (version 0.1) (including the minified versions). At the moment this plugin hasn't been tested in anything, if you find any issues let me know. I'll update my journal when a new version comes out.
This plugin is released under Artistic License 2.0.
To use the plugin you first need to upload the files jquery.trainmatrix.min.js and matrix_all-min.css to your server and include links to them in the head of your HTML. You will also need to upload matrix-20_20.png and depending on where you put the files you will have to update the link to the image in the CSS file.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/matrix_all-min.css" media="all">
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../js/jquery.trainmatrix.js"></script>
To apply the effect to an element:
$('#matrixexample').trainmatrix();
To apply the effect to an element with a custom string:
$('#matrixexample').trainmatrix({matrixText: 'This text will be used to generate the matrix'});
There are still quite a few limitations that will be fixed in future versions;
If you have any comments, questions, fixes or new characters please give me an email.