Capture number of lines in Paragraph Text for expression

[Alex Printz]

you could do something like measuring the height of your text box and dividing by the height of the leading between lines:

var t = thePathToTheTextObject;
var h = 12; //make this a size appropriate to the line height in pixels; can’t pull dynamically from character panel;
var n = text.sourceRecAtTime(time)/h;
n.toFixed(0)

I would suggest rigging h to a slider and test until it seems right, and then keep it there until it (might) break.

Alex Printz
Mograph Designer

[Alex Printz]

whoops, that:

var t = thePathToTheTextObject;
var h = 12; //make this a size appropriate to the line height in pixels; can’t pull dynamically from character panel;
var n = t.sourceRecAtTime(time)/h;
n.toFixed(0)

Alex Printz
Mograph Designer

[Troy Poirier]

Thank you so much, Alex! I don’t know why your specific code didn’t work for me, but you set me off in the right direction with sourceRectAtTime(). I found a similar chunk of code from Dan Ebberts elsewhere that led me to the solution below. Only oddity in this code was that I had to add a “padding” variable in order for the position value to match the manual setting I had before. Not a big deal, and this saves me so much time!

// text layer
t = thisComp.layer("text");

// paragraph text height
r = t.sourceRectAtTime(time,true).height;

// font line height + padding
y = 75;
p = y + 5;

// paragraph height divided by line height = # of lines
n = r/y;

// removes any decimals
n = n.toFixed(0);

/* code below spits out the Y Position values
for my 2 keyframes based on knowledge of
how many lines, up to 8 lines */

lines = 340 + p;
c = 0;

do {
lines = lines - p;
c++;
}
while (n > 1 && n < 9 && n != c);

lines;

if (numKeys > 1){
k1 = key(1).time;
k2 = key(2).time;
v1 = lines;
v2 = 473;
linear(time, k1, k2, v1, v2);
} else {
value
}

[John Millington]

Thanks for posting your code Troy ☺

I was getting an expression error on the line with the while loop, but it looks like it’s because when the code is posted here, the less-than sign < is converted to a HTML entity & l t ; ( I’ve added spaces so it doesn’t change to the < symbol).

Just replying in case it helps someone else.

[Andrei Popa]

Just in case someone still needs this today.

I needed to count the lines, stumbled on this solution and noticed some things were added by Adobe to after effects in the meantime.

I tried this solution and it worked perfectly with any type of font/fontsize/leading.

L = thisComp.layer("Text Layer");
var newStyle = L.text.sourceText.style;
var myLeading = newStyle.autoLeading ? newStyle.fontSize * 1.2 : newStyle.leading;
H = L.sourceRectAtTime(time, false).height;
rowNo = Math.ceil(H / myLeading);
rowNo;

You may need to replace the first row with a link to your actual text layer.

[Gerald mark Soto]

thank you so much. needed this. can I ask why the use of 1.2 in the expression. how does that help find the answer?

[Andrei Popa]

The autoleading value is 1.2. And sometimes when leading was different value but then set to autoleading, the expression took the value before the autoleading. So I have put that condition. If autoleading is true, than leading is fontsize*1.2

[Kane Daniel]

Thanks so much! This works perfectly. Thanks for posting.

[Tim Parsons]

I’m getting error codes that say that

“property or method named ‘style’ in Class ‘sourceText’ is missing or does not exist.” Same for autoLeading, fontSize, etc.

In my text layer, I don’t see these variables, and have no idea how to tell AE to either show them or know where to look for them.

Any ideas?

[Dan Ebberts]

I’m guessing that you either have an old version of AE or you have File > Project Settings > Expressions > Expression Engine set to Legacy ExtendScript instead of JavaScript.