After Effects – Variable Text Alignment

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Lance,

You can find an example project of mine here:

https://imgur.com/gallery/uh1GbDu

https://we.tl/t-3X3wBdYWIJ

[Lance Clayton]

Filip,

Thank you! – this is a great resource and learning tool.

Thanks for sharing.

Lance

[Lance Clayton]

Filip,

I applied your approach to a ‘text box’ (ie with a bounding box) vs a text layer without defined linebreak limits.

How do you actually define the leftmost and rightmost alignments? (see that mine does’t reach the edges in a 4k comp (2x your resolution)?

I see that your’s defines the right/leftmost by the longest word…

Thanks,

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[Filip Vandueren]

Correct I used the longets line,

currently there is no (convenient) way to retrieve the actual dimensions of a text-box using expressions.

but you could hard-code it like

maxWidth = 3900;

One approach of finding out the (approximate) actual width of a textbox I can think of, is to set the value of the sourceText (at a certain time) to:

if (time==-0.01) {
    txt="|".repeat(10000);
    style.setTracking(-250).setFontSize(10).setText(txt);
} else { value }

then

thisComp.layer("txt").sourceRectAtTime(-0.01).width;

would be a pretty accurate width.

but that’s just purely academical and not very practical (as 90% of my solutions 😉 )

[Lance Clayton]

I’ve got it working nicely enough now.

I did swap one line defining the width to 96.5% of the comp width (to accomodate for my margins to the side)

That said, it breaks when/if you use the Scale Composition script to resize the comp. As long as no-one does that we should be A-okay.

Thanks again for your brilliant guidance to a great solution.

—–

// selectorValue * textIndex/textTotal

widths=thisComp.layer(“lineWidths”).text.sourceText.split(“,”).map(a=>parseFloat(a));

maxWidth =thisComp.width*0.965;

delay = effect(“delay”)(“Slider”).value;

align = effect(“left – ctr – right”)(“Slider”).valueAtTime(time-textIndex*delay);

(maxWidth-widths[textIndex-1])*align/10000;

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FullScreenSuper_A01_LOWERCASE_2-1.gif 273 KB Graphics Interchange Format - Click to view

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