-
Adjust kerning via script (by any means necessary)
Hey all you helpful folks out there,
I’ve written a script that automates the process of adding branding, text, etc. to some of the videos my company makes. My producer (a graphic designer) is insistent that the kerning on the text layers be set to “Optical”, whereas it defaults to “Metric”.
I’m aware there’s no access to tracking/kerning via ExtendScript, but can anybody think of a workaround (even a shoddy one – the script is for internal use only) that would let me set the kerning with this script? The less thinking my coworkers have to do, the happier we’ll all be.
Would it be possible, maybe, to import a text layer from another project – one that is already set to optical kerning – and parent my current text layers to that? I realize this all sounds like a great deal of work for something pretty silly, but I’ll be distributing this script to 5 people who don’t use AE, so I want to make it as painless to use as possible – meaning, you don’t have to manually change the kerning after the script runs.
Thanks in advance for all your help!
Chris
-
3 Replies
-
I haven’t tested this, but it seems like it might work. If you include a text layer in the project that has the kerning selection you want and have the script select that layer, it should load the Character Palette with the attributes of the selected layer, and any new layers that the script creates should get those attributes.
Dan
-
Thanks Dan, I’ll test this out this week and let you know what I find out. I appreciate your prompt reply!
-
Just an update:
Having moderate progress here creating an animation preset out of a text layer with optical spacing, and then changing the (“Source Text”).value properties, but doing it this way means I can’t use resetCharStyle(), which screws things up in unexpected ways, but I think I can set the values after loading the preset.
I hope this can be helpful to somebody in the future, but more than this, I hope Adobe gives us access to kerning via script 🙂
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up