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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Expressions Problem pasting text into AE, is there an expressions solution to this?

  • Problem pasting text into AE, is there an expressions solution to this?

    Posted by Jermaine Pulley on October 24, 2008 at 6:19 pm

    Maybe there is an expressions secret that would solve this issue.

    I’m no pro but I do about 5 to 7 thirty second advertising animations in After Effects every week. Since I work a full time job, in school full time, and have a 9 week old baby, so I’m usually up late into the night/morning working on these animations to meet deadlines. Problem is I’m sending projects out with spelling errors. There should be no reason to have spelling errors because the marketing company sends over a word document with all the on screen text in it. If I copy and paste all the text into after effects I would have no spelling errors. When it’s already 3 am and you have to wake up at 6 am to go to work but you’re working on an animation it’s hard to see the difference between “compatibility” and “campatiblity.” I’m half sleep trying to type in words and screwing up.

    This is what happens; I copy the text from the word doc and then attempt to paste it into a text layer in AE. Sometimes it works and that good, most of the time it will either have the paste option grayed out in AF or do nothing when you press Ctrl + V. I understand you have the have the text layer selected and “l” looking line in place as if you were going to type on that layer in order to have paste feature not grayed out. Even when doing so it does not always paste from the clip board. I’ve even tried copying from word then pasting the text into notepad so there would be no code linked to the text, then copying from notepad and then to AE but this still does not always work. Many times when I try to paste into AE it will paste the last thing that was in the clipboard in AE almost as if its clipboard worked independently from the rest of the computer. For example if “Big Sale” was copied from a layer in after effects, but now I copy “Order Now” from word/notepad, I can even confirm by pasting my copied text in to word many many times and it will paste “Order Now” But When I go to AE and attempt to paste “Order Now” AE will paste “Big Sale” the previous clipboard text. I have tried everything purging everything from memory in AE before I copy/paste but still will not consistently work.

    This drives me crazy! I can be working on a project and copy/paste 3 lines of text just fine and then it will start this crap again. Sometimes I use flash when I have an animation that’s going to have a lot of text because it doesn’t have this problem. I’m much faster with AE and I like how smooth stills scroll across the screen in AE vs flash. Anyway, PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP ME!
    Sorry if I was long winded but I’m very passionate about this issue and I want you know where I was coming from with this.

    Working with:
    After Effects CS3 (whole CS3 master collection)
    Windows XP system pack 2
    Something like 3.2GB of viewable ram by my 32bit OS
    Core 2 Quad processor

    Jermaine Pulley replied 17 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Kevin Camp

    October 24, 2008 at 11:44 pm

    there is a script that may help you out. you can download it at crgreen.com/aescripts. it’s called crg_text_from_file, towards the bottom of the page. just right click the link and choose save file, and save it into the after effects scripts folder (make sure it keeps the .jsx tag). the next time you openg ae, it will show up in file>scripts.

    it will import each line of text from the file as a text layer in ae, so you may want to format the text file accordingly.

    it works best with .txt files, other types will bring in a bunch of extra text that you won’t want.

    hopefully this can help you out some.

    Kevin Camp
    Senior Designer
    KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

  • Andrew Bardusk

    February 10, 2009 at 10:16 pm

    Ok it’s a little late,
    I had the exact same problem. And after googling I have actually found that Microsoft released a patch to help with this problem. And it worked for me.

    https://support.microsoft.com/kb/941282

  • Jermaine Pulley

    February 10, 2009 at 10:26 pm

    Hey, thanks for the info I still hadn’t found a final fix for that issue. The workaround I was using was to paste all of the text that was going to use in that animation into its own comp when I first opened AE. Then from there I would copy and paste from one comp to the other, that was still a pain in the butt. I glad to finally have a fix for the isusse, thank you!

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