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Issues with text box alignment using sourceRectAtTime
I’m creating a lower third MOGRT and am having trouble keeping the elements aligned when I change the text. I have everything aligned perfectly with the placeholder text, but once I change the placeholder name, gaps show up between the different shapes and the right side of the shapes aren’t aligned, as shown in the screenshots. I imagine it has to do with the bounding box of the text since the placeholder has a character with a descender, but I’m not sure how to account for that so the text box remains aligned with the other shapes regardless of what text it is based on. Any help is appreciated! I also uploaded a simplified version of the AE project for a deeper look under the hood. Thanks!
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3 Replies
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I’ve found with Essential Graphics that expressions don’t seem to respond correctly when applied to the text layer being populated through EG. A workaround I’ve used is to have an invisible text layer that is linked to the Essential Properties and then link the sourceText of another text layer to that. It seems to do the trick.
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Ah yes descenders…they are a pain when building templates. You need to use the x-height of each line rather than calculating based on the bounding box height. I have found this site helpful when battling descenders. It requires more expressions but it’s they best way to handle everything.
https://motiondeveloper.com/blog/dealing-with-descenders
Alternatively, lock off your y position and just use the width of your text to figure out where to place your title box.
motiondeveloper.com
Dealing with text descenders in After Effects templates | Motion Developer
How get the height of a text layer without descenders in your After Effects templates, using expressions.
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Nothing wrong with Expressions and sourceRectAtTime() – 200% user error, for sure and x-height is not the answer. If it works, it’s because it got lucky. It’s a ‘maybe/iffy solution’. I’ve seen that website and it offers little to nothing in terms of actual, professional output – lots of supposed solutions not only from this site (which is actually good in other areas – except x-height) but very short on providing professional work samples.
If you want a good and quick solution then look at Adobe Express for this sort of output. Adobe Express and Canva provide really good quality output for this sort of work and they have automated and spreadsheet-linked features for scalable output.
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