Build a tool that writes a phrase into a frame as bubble lettering, one letter
at a time. Everything below is geometry you generate — no font of bubble letters
exists in this, and none is needed.

THE LETTERFORM

Bubble letters are not a typeface, they are an operation. Per letter:

1. Rasterise the glyph from a THIN face (weight ~300) into an offscreen tile.
   Starting from a heavy face is the obvious first move and it is wrong: dilation
   preserves topology, so a face whose counters are already small loses them and
   every letter collapses into the same blob. Bubble letters are drawn by writing
   the word thin and tracing a fat outline around it — do the same.
2. Compute an exact signed Euclidean distance transform of the glyph mask
   (Felzenszwalb–Huttenlocher: lower envelope of parabolas, one pass per axis,
   negative inside).
3. Extract the contour with marching squares at iso = inflate, interpolating
   each edge crossing so it is sub-pixel. Resolve the two saddle cases with the
   average of the four corners or contours will cross.
4. Link the segments into closed loops, resample to even arc length, smooth.

That gives a true offset curve, which means `inflate` is a real distance in em
units and the look survives any letter size. Test it: offsetting a convex shape
by r must add exactly perimeter·r + πr² of area (Steiner's formula). A blurred
bitmap thresholded until it looks right cannot pass that at several radii at once.

Dilation alone still returns the source face with rounded corners, because
offsetting a straight stem gives a straight stem. The sides of real bubble
letters bow. Add the thing the form is named after — a balloon:

5. Relax each loop under surface tension (each point pulled toward the mean of
   its neighbours) plus internal pressure (each point pushed along its outward
   normal). Tension alone is a smoothing flow that converges every loop on a
   circle and forgets the letter, so tether each point to within ~0.6 × inflate
   of where dilation put it. That clamp is the whole difference between a
   swollen R and an oval.

Marching squares emits every loop with the material on the left, so one normal
formula pushes outer loops outward and counters inward — the hole tightens while
the body swells, which is why counters end up as almond slits. Drop any counter
whose circularity (4πA/P²) falls below ~0.12: past that it is a sliver that
draws as a stray hook rather than a mark.

THE COMPOSITION

One sentence, broken across lines, laid in a zigzag cascade down a frame of a
declared ratio — lines overlapping, each at its own size and horizontal position.
Not a scatter of separate words. Lay the block out at unit scale and fit the
whole thing to the frame in one pass; scaling line by line lets a long phrase
walk off the bottom.

Give the frame real edges (16:9, 1:1, 4:5, 9:16) and centre it in the area the
reader can actually see — if a control panel covers part of the window, measure
the panel's EDGE, not its width. Export exactly the frame.

Outline weight must be constant across the whole composition: express it in
frame pixels once and divide it back out by each line's own scale, or a word set
twice as large is drawn twice as heavily.

THE ANIMATION

Letters arrive in reading order. A letter does not fade or slide in:

- ink dots gather at the letter's centre, and the letter INFLATES around them,
  starting from roughly a dot and overshooting slightly before it settles
  (easeOutBack — the overshoot is the pop; without it a letter merely grows and
  reads as a zoom);
- once landed it never fully stops moving: a small continuous jiggle in scale,
  tilt and drift, each letter on its own phase;
- it leaves the way it arrived, reversed — deflating while the same cluster of
  dots scatters back out of it.

The dots are INK. They have no opacity, ever. They shrink and they move; a mark
on paper exists or it does not, and a fading dot reads as a screen effect. Draw
them under the letters so a growing letter's fill closes over the cluster it
came from. Give dots only to the animations that earn them — a letter that drops
in did not come from anywhere, and dots under it read as debris.

Offer a few entrances (inflate, pop, drop, rise, swing) and exits (deflate,
burst, drop, shrink), a hold, and a loop.

CONTROLS WORTH HAVING

Phrase; face, weight, inflate, plump, tracking, outline weight, wobble; entrance,
exit, write rate, line lead, pop, hold, exit rate, dots, dot size, jiggle, speed,
loop; frame ratio, align, cascade, overlap, size variation, tilt, margin, seed;
ink and paper as real colour pickers with an optional gradient across the whole
piece; and a randomize that rolls all of it — including the frame and the face —
while always keeping the phrase.

CREDIT

This is a study of Tracy Ma's bubble-letter animation "Do You Remember The First
Time?" made for the Blonded team (2019), with placement behaviour recovered from
the published source of The New York Times' "Gen X Is A Mess" (2019, draw-on by
Aliza Aufrichtig). Their letters are drawn by hand; what this builds is a
generator that produces that class of lettering for any text. Do not copy their
artwork. Credit the reference in whatever you make.