Creating a textbox and align it to an area via extendscript

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Emre,

to my knowledge it’s still not possible to create textbox-textlayers via scripting, only paragraph text.

You can only check if a textlayer is a text-box and get its dimensions/position, not set the properties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P76aFYmOR8

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[Dan Ebberts]

Scripting does have a command specifically for creating box text, so you could do something like this to create the text and center the anchor point within the resulting text (which will be centered within the comp):

var myComp = app.project.activeItem;
var myTextLayer = myComp.layers.addBoxText([300,500]);
var mySourceText = myTextLayer.property("ADBE Text Properties").property("ADBE Text Document");
var myTextDoc = mySourceText.value;
myTextDoc.text = "This is a line of text for my new text box.";
myTextDoc.justification = ParagraphJustification.CENTER_JUSTIFY;
mySourceText.setValue(myTextDoc);
var myRect = myTextLayer.sourceRectAtTime(0,false);
var newAP = [myRect.left + myRect.width/2, myRect.top + myRect.height/2];
myTextLayer.property("Anchor Point").setValue(newAP);

[Filip Vandueren]

That’s great. I don’t script often and have always missed this. Thanks Dan.

[Emre Mutlu]

Thank you very much guys. I was having trouble to change style of the text box which i’ve added but figure it out too. I’m adding my code here too. Looks like you should use TextDocument object to modify the style of text box.

var titleLayer = mainComp.layers.addBoxText([1250,500]);

// Title Text Properities ///////////////////////////////////////////

var titleTextDoc = new TextDocument(“Test Text”);

titleLayer.property(“Source Text”).setValue(titleTextDoc);

var textProp = titleLayer.property(“Source Text”);

titleTextDoc = textProp.value;

titleTextDoc.fontSize = 50;

titleTextDoc.text = title;

titleTextDoc.fillColor = [1,0,0];

titleTextDoc.justification = ParagraphJustification.CENTER_JUSTIFY;

textProp.setValue(titleTextDoc);