After Effects Text Animation – Display Words one after another

[Peter Band]

I was looking for a way to display one word at a time in the same place and came across Walter’s expression – it worked great.

Now I am looking to adjust the duration / how long a word is displayed based on its length (number of letters in the word). I tried pre-composing and time-remapping but to no avail.

I know that I can get the number of letters of a word by using layer.text.sourceText.length. But how could I go about using that as a delay or factor to influence how long the word is displayed?

[Fabrice Leconte]

Based on word length.

t = value.split(' ');
w = 0;
c = 0;
for (i = 0; i < t.length; i++) {
    if (c < time) {
        c += t[i].length;
        w = i;
    }
}
linear(time, time, c, t[w],t[w])

[Peter Band]

Thank you for your response Fabrice.

It’s not working in my AE (2020). I am getting the expression error “Couldn’t turn result into numeric value” in the first line. I am only getting this error once I put in the for() loop. Seems like a data type issue. I tried parseInt() but didn’t have any luck with that.

[Fabrice Leconte]

OK, sorry I tried with a numeric string such as:

“1 22 333 4444 55555”

For a string, use:

t = value.split(' ');
w = 0;
c = 0;
for (i = 0; i < t.length; i++) {
    if (c < time) {
        c += t[i].length;
        w = i;
    }
}
t[w]

[Peter Band]

Thanks! This is working great.

I inserted another variable to control the overall speed. Now I am wondering how to define a minimum duration for each word to be displayed.

t = value.split(' ');
w = 0;
c = 0;
speedFactor = 0.5;
for (i = 0; i < t.length; i++) {
    if (c < time) {
        c += t[i].length*speedFactor;
        w = i;
    }
}
t[w]

[Fabrice Leconte]

Use Math.max()

t = value.split(' ');
w = 0;
c = 0;
speedFactor = 0.5;
minDur = 2;
for (i = 0; i < t.length; i++) {
    if (c < time) {
        c += Math.max(t[i].length*speedFactor,minDur);
        w = i;
    }
}
t[w]

[Guto Bernardo]

this helped me so much!! thx