Change colour of certain characters in a text layer

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

I managed to achieve something although it’s not quite right.
I added a red fill color and an expression selector to the text and added the following expression to the “amount” property:

txt = text.sourceText;
c = txt[textIndex];
if (c == “t”)
100
else if (c == “g”)
100
else if (c == “i”)
100
else if (c == “f”)
100
else if (c == “T”)
100
else if (c == “G”)
100
else if (c == “I”)
100
else if (c == “F”)
100
else
0;

I’m sure there is an easier way to say if the text is either t,g,i or f then do this but I don’t know what it is.
Anyway using this method it seemed to work but then I noticed there were a couple of random r’s that were red and some of the i’s weren’t.

[Dan Ebberts]

I’d probably do it like this:

c = text.sourceText[textIndex-1].toLowerCase();
if (c == “t” || c == “g” || c == “i” || c == “f”) 100 else 0

Dan

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for getting back to me.
That’s certainly a lot neater.

Using that exact code, I’m still getting errors. Has it got anything to do with the text being on 2 lines messing up the index? If I make it so that it’s all on one line then the correct letters are highlighted.

As you can see in the example below when it’s on 2 lines, some of the wrong letters are highlighted.

[Dan Ebberts]

Ah. Try this one:

c = text.sourceText.replace(/\r?\n|\r/g,””)[textIndex-1].toLowerCase();
if (c == “t” || c == “g” || c == “i” || c == “f”) 100 else 0

Dan

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

Weirdly it still isn’t working.
I’ve purged the cache and restarted my computer to make sure that’s not affecting the result.

This is the result from using your new code above. It’s the same result.

I’ve noticed that if I change [textIndex-1] to just [textIndex] then I get the following result.

Which makes things correct on the second line of text but wrong on the first line.
Incidentally it works flawlessly for text that’s only on a single line.

[Stefan Zerdzinski]

Aha! I’ve figured out why it was messing up.
In order to split the two lines of text up I pressed Enter. This seems to be changing something to do with the text index.

I replaced the text with a text box and then made the text box smaller in order to force the text across 2 lines. This seems to work absolutely fine now.

Do you know why having a… I don’t know what you’d call it… Line Break? would mess things up?

[Dan Ebberts]

That is strange. It works for me for both point text with line breaks and box text.

The issue is that line breaks count as characters when indexing into the text.sourceText array, but they get skipped for textIndex within an expression selector expression.

Dan