The Mouse's Tale

Question

Write a program that outputs Lewis Carroll's poem The Mouse's Tale from Alice in Wonderland, drawn in its distinctive tail-like shape.

Plain text of the poem:

Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house, 'Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you.— Come, I'll take no denial; We must have a trial: For really this morning I've nothing to do.' Said the mouse to the cur, 'Such a trial, dear sir, With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.' 'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' Said cunning old Fury; 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.'

Your output could be ASCII art or an image or an animation or a webpage or pretty much anything that follows the rules. The point of course is to be artistic and original.

The highest voted answer will win in approximately one week.

Rules

• Your representation of the poem must exactly match the quoted text above.
• Your representation must be legible. Any literate person with decent eyesight should be able to decipher it and not have to zoom in.
• The tail must be vertically oriented, taking roughly 2 to 3 times more vertical space than horizontal space.
• The tail must be thicker at the top and grow thinner as it gets to the bottom.
• There must be at least 3 distinct curves or turns in the shape of the tail. (I count 5 above.)
• You may not use existing images/layouts of the poem as your output or in your code.
• You must actually write a program that generates your output. You cannot simply arrange some text in Photoshop.

Answer 1

JavaScript, animated edition

Live Demo

HTML

<div id='wrapper'>
    <p id='intro'>
        "It is a long tail, certainly," said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse's tail; "but why do you call it sad?" And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this:&mdash;"
    </p>
    <div id='tail'></div>
</div>

CSS

#wrapper { width: 300px; font: 16px serif; text-align: justify; }
p { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
p.wordEl { position: relative; }

JS

var poem = "Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house, 'Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you.- Come, I'll take no denial; We must have a trial: For really this morning I've nothing to do.' Said the mouse to the cur, 'Such a trial, dear sir, With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.' 'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' Said cunning old Fury; 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.'\" ",
    words = poem.match(/.{0,15}[ ]/g),
    wordEls = [],
    tail = document.getElementById('tail'),
    startFontSize = 16,
    endFontSize = 8;

for (var i = 0; i < words.length; ++i) {
    var word = words[i].slice(0, words[i].length - 1);

    var wordEl = document.createElement('p');
    wordEl.className = 'wordEl';
    wordEl.innerText = word;
    wordEl.style.setProperty('font-size', (Math.round(((words.length - i) / words.length) * (startFontSize - endFontSize)) + endFontSize) + 'px');
    wordEls.push(wordEl);

    tail.appendChild(wordEl);
}

var counter = 0;
setInterval(function() {
    ++counter;
    for (var i = 0; i < wordEls.length; ++i) {
        var sn = Math.sin((i*2 + counter) / 5) * 150; // sn = result of math.SiN
        var wsn = sn * (i / wordEls.length); // weighted sn
        wordEls[i].style.setProperty('left', (wsn + 150) + 'px');
    }
}, 50);