Draw a box around subtitled text?

[Dan Ebberts]

You could scale a black solid’s width based on the character count of the text, or you could use the sampleImage() hack (search this forum for sampleImage and you should find it) if you need more precision (but it is very inefficient and slow).

You could also do it with a script, but you’d have to run the script whenever you changed the text.

Dan

[Darryl Torke]

Thanks! I used the scale version and it looks pretty good. I have another question though, do you know if using after effects expressions I could find out how many characters are on a certain line of sourcetext? for example, could it return to answer to “how many characters are on line 5 in this body of text?”. Is that within after effects capabilities?

[Dan Ebberts]

Is it box text? If so, I don’t think so.

If it’s just a text layer with multiple lines, an expression could split the text based on carriage return characters and get the number of characters of any particular line (or the longest line, if that’s what you wanted).

Dan

[Darryl Torke]

It is just a text layer with multiple lines, is it possible you could direct me to an example where carriage returns are used to parse out lines? Admittedly this is a bit above my level of understanding. Thank you for your time, no worries if you can’t.

[Dan Ebberts]

At the end of this routine, the variable lineMax should contain the number of characters in the longest line:


myText = thisComp.layer("Text Layer").text.sourceText;
splitText = myText.split("\r");
lineMax = 0;
for (var i =0; i < splitText.length; i++){
lineMax = Math.max(lineMax,splitText[i].length);
}


Not that in the second line, there should be a backslash in the quotes, preceding the r, but it probably wont survive the html conversion.

Dan

[Darryl Torke]

Dan, truly. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Worked like a charm. Your skill is honestly incomparable. Thanks for “giving it forward” to us coding plebs.