Find out position of individual characters in text layer
updated 1 week, 3 days ago 4 Members · 8
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Hi!
I would like to enable the people who use my .aep to visually position two guide-layers on a text layer, to choose a text range to be highlighted.
Therefore, I would have to inquire the position of individual letters and their index inside the text string. Is that possible? Or does anybody have an idea for a workaround?
Thanks!
I don’t think what you want is possible. The best way I can think of to do that would be to put a point control or 2 sliders on the text, and those 2 values would be the start character index/end character index of the highlight part.
If you want to make this graphically visible with guide layers, I think you could put 2 squares or something at the top of the composition and get the indexes based on those 2 layers x-position. Basically, like a volume bar, but to control those values. You can divide the x position by 10 or something like that to make it easier to control(kind of lowering the sensitivity).
You can also add an expression like the following one to those 2 layers to make sure they stay fixed on the y axis.
yVal = 100;//200 for the other one
[value[0],yVal]
Possible, but not in a very straightforward way.
Is the textlayer always just 1 line, Or could it sometimes be multiple lines ? Is it a paragraph text or a box-text ?
The actual highlighting is done with a text-animator ?
Wow, thanks a lot Filip! I will take this project apart for educational purposes if I may!
No, the text layer can have different numbers of lines, but it’s always paragraph text.
And yes, the highlighting is going to work with text-animators at first. But I’m shure I can tweak your expression so it could also use a backdrop or anythig else! After all it does seem to return a position at some point.
Again, thank you very much!
Tilman
The only thing you have to look out with, if is the textanimators start changing position or scale of the highlighted characters.
Hi Filip, awesome expression set up you made there. Just out of curiosity, since I checked it out to learn a thing or two, I noticed that the expression sometimes does not work with certain fonts. I did not recognize a pattern, but the problem is always the same as that the coordinates pushed into the array are zero. As far as I understand the expression I did not find a reason for this, any idea why that is?
Maybe those fonts don’t have a pipe symbol, or a weirdly shaped one.
Try disabling the expression selector of the “font height hack” animator, and then every character should be changed to a string like ||| | |||| | |
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