$evalfile, Stylizing external text on the same line.

[Dan Ebberts]

When a text layer’s text is updated by an expression or script, everything gets the formatting of the first character. To have different styling, you’d have to use separate text layers. Positioning the layers based on the dimensions of the actual text is straight forward with scripting, problematic with expressions.

Dan

[Brian Nishii]

Thank you Dan for your response.

I tried using your script posted elsewhere to retrieve text layer coordinates by the sampleImage method, but kept on getting time-out errors so I gave up.

In the end, I figured out a not so precise but perfectly acceptable solution: because the text layer styling is constant, I pulled the character index of the first text layer, multiplied it by an appropriate number of pixels, to get an X position offset for the second layer.

In case any non-smart amateur out there like me is curious, here’s what I did for dynamically spacing variables for my Lower Thirds off of a text file, and my workflow:

1) Create a text file, with a line for each LowerThird:

var L3_1 = [“Variable0text”, “Variable1text”, “Variable2text”,”Variable3text”];

2) In AE, design Lower Third comp. In my case, I wanted two “text lines” with 2 variables each being pulled in to look like:

Variable0 Variable1
Variable2 Variable3

3) For the position value of Variable1:

pos=thisComp.layer("Variable0TextLayer").transform.position;
st=thisComp.layer("Variable0TextLayer").text.sourceText;
ix=st.length;
X=pos[0]+(ix*22);
Y=pos[1];
Z=pos[2];
[X,Y,Z]

So in my case, 22 pixels was the right amount of offset per character of Variable 0 to give an offset for Variable1.

4) For the Source text field of each Variable:


myPath = "/Volumes/myPath/L3source.txt" ;
$.evalFile(myPath);
try{
eval(thisComp.name) [1];
}catch (err){
"Missing";
}


5) Once design is set, Duplicate L3_1 the number of times you have LowerThirds, and move renders into a designated folder. Any time you need to make design changes, change L3_1, duplicate, batch render, replace into said folder, and NLE relinks…..

Awesome workflow for a wishy washy client. GOLDEN!!

If it weren’t for geniuses like Dan Ebberts, what would us dumb folk do?