• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Find the Position of a Specific Character in a Text Layer

  Posted by Erin Prysiazny on August 20, 2019 at 2:31 am

  Hey!

  I’ve been creating a template for a client and I want to have a precomped animation be positioned at the end of whatever title they type into the text layer.
  Is there a way to use expressions to find out what the position of the last character in a string is?

  Thanks in advance!
  Erin

  Dan Ebberts

  

  replied 7 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  August 20, 2019 at 3:03 am

  This might work–it should give you the right edge of the text:

  L = thisComp.layer(“TEXT”);
  r = L.sourceRectAtTime(time,false);
  L.toComp([r.left+r.width,r.top+r.height/2])

  If you want the animation to always keep its own y value, it would be like this:

  L = thisComp.layer(“TEXT”);
  r = L.sourceRectAtTime(time,false);
  x = L.toComp([r.left+r.width,r.top+r.height/2])[0];
  [x,value[1]]

  There are other variations, depending on what you need exactly.

  Dan
• 

  Erin Prysiazny

  August 20, 2019 at 12:52 pm

  Thanks Dan! Will this also account for if the last line of the title is shorter than the others?
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  August 20, 2019 at 2:31 pm

  No, it wouldn’t work for multi-line text.

  Dan

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up