Adding line breaks to a block of text based on character length

[Brice Munn]

Would a text bounding box work? Just click and drag with the type tool to create a rectangular text box like you would make in word processing or graphics software. Then you can use the normal settings in the Character and Paragraph windows to control the typesetting.

[TIneke Van Schalkwyk]

Hmm, no this wouldn’t work as it wouldn’t divide the text evenly over the lines. So you might be left with a single word on the last line.

So far we have this which is working great for shorter texts where we only want two lines.
But for longer text, we need it to divide into 3 lines.

function breakInTwo(myString) {
var mid = Math.floor(myString.length / 2);
var before = myString.lastIndexOf(” “, mid);
var after = myString.indexOf(” “, mid + 1);

if (before == -1 || (after != -1 && mid – before >= after – mid)) {
mid = after;
} else {
mid = before;
}
return myString.substring(0, mid) + “\n” + myString.substring(mid + 1);
}

if (text.sourceText.indexOf(“\n”) != -1 || text.sourceText.indexOf(“\r”) != -1 || text.sourceText.length<18) {
value;
} else {
val = breakInTwo(text.sourceText);

style.setFont(comp(“00 Color Control”).layer(“Headline Text Font Style”).text.sourceText).setText(val);
}

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Tineke, just wondering – lines still remains not perfectly equal in sizes, due to different letters width. Is that an issue or not at all for you?

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[TIneke Van Schalkwyk]

No that doesn’t matter to me.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Tineke – then caps lock in the first post on ‘evenly’ does not really make sense.

Reason – IF you have a superlongtextinoneline this won’t work nicely ! (:

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[Andrei Popa]

You can try this. You can write as many ifs as you want to set the part number you want your text split into.


function breakTextInEqualParts(myString, partNo) {
var splits = [0];
var subStrings = [];
var strLength = myString.length;
if (
partNo < 2 ||
myString == "" ||
text.sourceText.indexOf("\n") != -1 ||
text.sourceText.indexOf("\r") != -1 ||
text.sourceText.length < 20
)
return myString;

for (var i = 1; i < partNo; i++) {
splits.push(Math.round(strLength / partNo) + splits[i - 1]);
}
splits.push(strLength);

for (var i = 0; i < strLength - 1; i++) {
subStrings.push(breakText(myString, splits[i], splits[i + 1]));
}

return subStrings.join("\n");

function breakText(myString, idx1, idx2) {
if (myString == "") return "";
idx1 = calcIndex(myString, idx1);
idx2 = calcIndex(myString, idx2);
return myString.substring(idx1, idx2);

function calcIndex(myString, idx) {
if (idx == 0) return idx;
var before = myString.lastIndexOf(" ", idx);
var after = myString.indexOf(" ", idx + 1);

if (before == -1 || (after != -1 && idx - before >= after - idx)) {
idx = after;
} else {
idx = before;
}
return idx;
}
}
}

var len = text.sourceText.length;
if (len > 40) parts = 2;
else if (len > 20) parts = 3;
else parts = 1;

var ctrlStyle = thisComp.layer(index - 1).text.sourceText.style;
val = breakTextInEqualParts(text.sourceText, parts);
style.setFont(ctrlStyle.font).setText(val).setFontSize(ctrlStyle.fontSize);


Andrei
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[TIneke Van Schalkwyk]

Thanks Andrei!
Should it work if I copy and paste exactly what you have posted?
I get an “Error: Layer index 0 out of range”

[TIneke Van Schalkwyk]

So, I removed the line at the end to do with the font style as that what was causing the error to see if I could get the rest of the expression functioning correctly as a starting point.
However, it removes the last word which is a bit of an issue ☺

This was the line I removed incase you need to know but I don’t think that is what is causing the last word to be removed:
style.setFont(ctrlStyle.font).setText(val).setFontSize(ctrlStyle.fontSize);

Any ideas?