Is it possible to create text flags for custom text styles for Motion Graphics Templates?

[Filip Vandueren]

AFAIK, you can now get and set the style of a text-layer via expressions,
but you can only set the style of the entire layer, not individual letters/words, ranges.

Alternatively, you could do faux Bold, faux italic, and colors easily using textAnimators.
A Bold would be a thicker Stroke on some letters, Italic would be a slight Skew, Fill and Stroke colors can be set with textAnimators too.

Using some expressions on The sourceText and expression Selectors on those animators, a Frankenstein html-parser can be created, although – of course – it renders horribly slow.

Here’s something I spitballed together:
14189_htmlparser.aep.zip

[Clint Porter]

Wow Filip, that’s really amazing! Nice job on that!

While I’m really looking forward to the day that After Effects can give Premiere users something more flexible, I think I’ll try to incorporate the color fill code into what I’m making.

Thanks again! -Clint

[Victor Ribbs]

Hello,
this is exactly what I’m looking for but I have a error typeError ranges.toSource is not a function, I populate the text field with a script.
could you help me ?

[Filip Vandueren]

This project uses the old Javascript engine.
Project Settings -> Expressions -> Extendscript Legacy.

I’ll try and fix it tomorrow, but it’s still just a proof of concept, don’t know if this is production-ready.

[Filip Vandueren]

ranges.toSource();

has to become:

JSON.stringify(ranges);

and every eval() has to be changed to JSON.parse()

[Victor Ribbs]

thank-you

on https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/legacy-and-extend-script-engine.html
i have find this

props.join("\n");
Returns an array of strings listing the properties and methods available.

[Victor Ribbs]

thank-you
it works with your corrections

[Malcolm Ricci]

Hey Filip,

I’ve recently come across this and it works great, so thanks first of all.

I wanted to ask whether there is anything that I could do to avoid it taking so long to render…

I’m relatively new to expressions, but from what I’ve understood is it taking so long due to it having to go through every layer on every frame?

Thanks

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Malcolm, as you know that solution was just a purely academic excercise to see if I could figure out some way to do it in just 1 layer.

I’ll see if I can come up with some optimisations, but expressions selectors always seem to bog down after effects. I’ll report back shortly.

[Filip Vandueren]

Here’s a version that doesn’t try to do everything in 1 layer, and also a slightly different approach on how I stored the ranges.

– 1 guide-layer to enter the “html”

– 1 guide-layer to analyse what character-ranges are affected by what “tag”

– 1 layer that “renders” the html.

It should render about 2.5 times faster, but I’m sure there’s still room for improvement.

https://we.tl/t-UcUZZglNv7