typewriter for text but with a twist

[Filip Vandueren]

It’s very very easy to achieve with multiple text layers and basic animation.

What exactly would you need an expression for ?

[Hamood Hallak]

its for 10 social posts and each one will have around 5 changing words
so animating all that with the blinking cursor and the brackets seems a bit too much work for something that might be solved with expressions

…. but i forgot to mention that there is a box changing size according to the text layer

[Filip Vandueren]

There’s probably a more compact way, but this is what I came up with:

Expression for sourceText:

prefix = "decode your < ";
phrases = ["life","the universe", "everything"];
suffix = " >";
cursor = "_";

char_map=[];
for (phrase of phrases) {
for (i=0; i<phrase.length; i++) {
char_map.push(phrase.substr(0,i));
}
for (i=phrase.length; i>0; i--) {
char_map.push(phrase.substr(0,i));
}
}
char_map.push("");

char_index=clamp(Math.floor(effect("char")("Slider").value) , 0, char_map.length-1);

insert = char_map[char_index];

prefix+insert+cursor+suffix;


Add a slider named “char” and animate that from 0 to … (in this example 52) which is the number of virtual keystrokes, including the backspaces to erase letters.
This way you can manually adjust the timing of how long you want a word to stay, should it backspace faster than it types etc.
Or if you want to automate this, just put an expression on the slider like “time*5;”

Please don’t ask for an expression that has variable timings before and after each word is complete, and different speeds etc. it took me longer to type this sentence than it would to simply keyframe that using the char-slider ?

Blinking the Cursor is pretty easy with a text_animator:
– range Selector set to index of characters
– Start: text.sourceText.indexOf("_");
– End: text.sourceText.indexOf("_") + 1;

The opacity of that animator could have an expression in the vain of

if (effect("char")("Slider").speed==0) linear(time%1.5, .75, 1.25, 100,0); else 100;

to blink the cursor, but only when it’s not typing.

Auto-sizing Text-boxes using sourceRectAtTime() should be easy enough to find, I prefer the ones that actually draw a path instead of a rectangle.

[Hamood Hallak]

worked like a charm thanks
but the blinking cursor is very slow it only blinks once no matter how long the pause is on the sliders keyframes
is there a way to control the speed of it and if it can only go to 0 or 100 and nothing in between

again i appreciate the help

[Filip Vandueren]

That’s strange, for me it blinks every 1.5 seconds when there’s no change in the sliders.
Maybe use Hold Keyframes in the slider to be absolutely sure.

This would be a hard on/off blink, once per second:

if (effect("char")("Slider").speed==0) {
time%1 < 0.5 ? 100 : 0;
} else {
100;
}