Paragraph Text Question via scripting

[Mirza Kadic]

Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is a non-profit project where there would be thousands of these text boxes and I really want them to look decent without the need to correct all 6000ish of them. Thanks again! 🙂

[Filip Vandueren]

Try this, it’s a kind of brute-force approach (it tries every possible line length and chooses the one that has the least difference in line-lengths), but it works:

You will have to manually input the ideal maxWidth-value though, as that depends on the font used and the width of the box.

If the value is too high, then the text-box will also wrapping, and we don’t want that.

But you might not even need to use text-boxes using this approach ?

var txt = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam rutrum sapien ultrices sapien condimentum, et congue risus placerat.";
maxWidth = 110;
minWidth = 30;
var results=[];
for (i=maxWidth; i>=minWidth; i--) {
	const splitter = new RegExp('(.{'+i+'}[^ ]* )', 'g');
	const newTxt = txt.replace(splitter, '$1\n'); 
	const lines = newTxt.split('\n');
	const lineLengths = lines.map(a=> a.length);
	results[i] = {
		index: i,
		txt: newTxt,
		lines: lines.length,
		contrast: Math.max.apply(Math, lineLengths) - Math.min.apply(Math, lineLengths)
	}
}
// best match has the lowest contrast (diff betweens longest and shortest line) and the lowest amount of lines
results.reduce( (acc, curr) => 	((curr.contrast < acc.contrast) && (curr.lines<=acc.lines)) ? curr : acc , results[maxWidth]).txt;

One Last thing: if there are line-breaks in the input-text already, then it won’t work as expected. You might want to first filter them out.

[Mirza Kadic]

Wow, thanks a lot, the problem is (since this is too high stuff for me, just started learning javascript/extendscript last year), is that I get an error, “> does not have a value” in (a=> a.length); Am I doing something wrong?

[Filip Vandueren]

That would probably mean you are either working in an older version of After Effects, or the current version’s expressions – engine is set to Legacy mode (in the project settings )

I can rewrite the code tomorrow so it works on older versions of After Effects tomorrow

[Mirza Kadic]

It’s latest AE, but switching to javascript did the trick. It’s working, thank you so much, it’s actually working without text box, just regular text. I really really appreciate this Filip, thank a lot!

[Mirza Kadic]

Just one question, is it possible to rewrite this for a script? If it’s in expression I have to convert expression to keyframes and all that pain… Thanks!