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Scale a solid to text size
Does anyone know an expression that will scale a solid to the bounding box of a text layer within the same comp? So as you type on the text layer the solid beneath it will scale horizontally and vertically according to the character count and line count of the text layer.
Thanks in advance,
-Mike
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5 Replies
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Unfortunately, expressions (and scripts) don’t have access to the bounding box info. If you need it bad enough, it’s possible to build a table of character widths (by analyzing the font glyphs) that you can use to get pretty close by having the expression add up the widths of all the characters in the text layer. It’s a pain, but it can work.
Dan
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I’m on vacation, I’m separated from my After Effects, so I can’t check it out, but are there any Wing-dings that are solid blocks that fill the space where a letter would be? If so (a big if I know) you could have a duplicate text layer below that would substitute blocks for letters, and therefore act as a background for the text above.
Crazy conjecture, I know.
If no block wing-dings exist, can you create your own font (of solid colored blocks) that could be used as above?
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Thanks. I don’t need it that bad, but thanks for looking into it.
-mike
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I think making a font of blocks might work. I think I’m following you.
I can link it to the souce text of the input layer. As long as I have a bit of an overlap for each character…
It might work.Thanks,
-mike -
Good suggestion. I’ve seen it done that way too, where what you’re after isn’t necessarily the bounding box – you just want to highlight the text. In the case I’m familiar with, the client actually created a duplicate font, where the characters were the same width as those in the normal font, but they were solid rectangular blocks.
As I recall, there was a trick to get the seams between the letters to not be visible – might have been putting the highlight layer into draft quality to kill the anti-aliasing.
Dan
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