• Adobe After Effects

  How to change text to bold using expressions?

  Posted by Maeve Tan on September 19, 2022 at 8:43 pm

  Hi, so I’d like to make one text layer outputting a sentence with two different font style/weight, e.g “I would like this word to be bold“.
  <div>
  </div><div>But I’d like to make my layer dynamic, so I can change it anytime I want. And to make the font bold I’d like to be able to use a special character to change it. Just like how we use an asterisk(*) between a word to make it bold on Whatsapp.</div><div>
  </div><div>I know to make a layer dynamic I’d have to use</div><div>thisComp.layer(“inputTextLayer”).text.sourceText;</div><div>
  </div><div>But to make the selected words of that input change to bold is what I’m stuck on. I thought I might be able to do it with .style or something and use .split(“*”) to command the text to change to bold etc.</div><div>
  </div><div>Any ideas on how this would be achieved? Thanks!</div>

  Filip Vandueren replied 3 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Filip Vandueren

  September 20, 2022 at 12:38 pm

  Having the original text with asterisks in a separate layer is a good idea BTW.

  Try this for your dual-styled layer:

  • expression for sourceText:

  t=thisComp.layer("inputTextLayer").text.sourceText;
  st = t.style;
  st.setText( t.replace(/\*/g,'') );

  • add an animator with these properties:
    • Stroke Opacity: 100%
    • Stroke Color: expression: text.sourceText.style.fillColor + [0,0,0,1];
    • Stroke Width: expression: text.sourceText.style.fontSize/16;
      the smaller that last number, the fatter your Faux Bold, it depends on your font, anything from 8-30/40 could work (the thinner the font you start with, the higher this number will also likely be, it’s a design decision)
    • Optionally, you could add a tiny bit of tracking at about 1-2
  • remove the default Range selector from the animator and add an expression selector.
    This is the expression for the selector amount:

  t=thisComp.layer("inputTextLayer").text.sourceText.replace(/\n|\r|\u0003/g,"");
  bold=false;
  upTo = textIndex;
  for (i=0; i<upTo; i++) {
      if (t[i]=="*") {
          bold=!bold;
          upTo++; i++;
      }
  }
  bold ? 100 : 0;

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