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After Effects – Variable Text Alignment
Hi everyone.
Im trying to build a template that can take any input copy and be able to initially right align it, and then left align it, driven by two keyframes.
Hoping there’s some expression code that can dive to this level and help achieve this regardless of how many characters are in each word.
Thanks for any thoughts.
GIF EXAMPLE
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5 Replies
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Filip,
Thank you! – this is a great resource and learning tool.
Thanks for sharing.
Lance
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Filip,
I applied your approach to a ‘text box’ (ie with a bounding box) vs a text layer without defined linebreak limits.
How do you actually define the leftmost and rightmost alignments? (see that mine does’t reach the edges in a 4k comp (2x your resolution)?
I see that your’s defines the right/leftmost by the longest word…
Thanks,
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Correct I used the longets line,
currently there is no (convenient) way to retrieve the actual dimensions of a text-box using expressions.
but you could hard-code it like
maxWidth = 3900;
One approach of finding out the (approximate) actual width of a textbox I can think of, is to set the value of the sourceText (at a certain time) to:
if (time==-0.01) {
txt="|".repeat(10000);
style.setTracking(-250).setFontSize(10).setText(txt);
} else { value }then
thisComp.layer("txt").sourceRectAtTime(-0.01).width;would be a pretty accurate width.
but that’s just purely academical and not very practical (as 90% of my solutions 😉 )
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I’ve got it working nicely enough now.
I did swap one line defining the width to 96.5% of the comp width (to accomodate for my margins to the side)
That said, it breaks when/if you use the Scale Composition script to resize the comp. As long as no-one does that we should be A-okay.
Thanks again for your brilliant guidance to a great solution.
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// selectorValue * textIndex/textTotal
widths=thisComp.layer(“lineWidths”).text.sourceText.split(“,”).map(a=>parseFloat(a));
maxWidth =thisComp.width*0.965;
delay = effect(“delay”)(“Slider”).value;
align = effect(“left – ctr – right”)(“Slider”).valueAtTime(time-textIndex*delay);
(maxWidth-widths[textIndex-1])*align/10000;
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