follow typing text

[Filip Vandueren]

Impossible, unless you limit your design choices:

there’s no way of knowing what pixel-position the cursor would be at, unless you’re using a fixed-width, fixed height 1 font-size text.
Using 60px Andale Mono in a square pixels comp, gave me characters that were always 36 px apart.

So this worked for me:

l=thisComp.layer("fixed width text");
i=thisComp.layer("fixed width text").text.animator("Animator 1").selector("Range Selector 1").end-1;

c=i;

l.position + [i*36,0]


But then it’s very tricky to know on what line of a multi-line text the current character is on.

Do you need a special shape for the cursor ? Why can’t it be done with a variant of the word-processor effect ?

[Jonathan Reyes]

hmmm…ok thanks Filip, that’s good to know. I appreciate the code. The cursor will actually be an animated icon. I can do the movement by hand, but the animation will be used for episodic content, as such, will need to be updated each week by people not too familiar with after effects. I’m basically just setting up a template for them where they can type in the text and hit the render button.