[Filip Vandueren]

It’s less stable if I implement it on 1 layer, but I’ll post a version later.

They would have to disable an expression before editing otherwise it would be very slow to edit the text.

[Filip Vandueren]

I made a project-file:

https://we.tl/t-RgqaPEuSxo

Can you check if this does what you need ?

https://imgur.com/a/a7FZtRV

View post on imgur.com

[Filip Vandueren]

Well for Effect Properties I think you can just use value.length ?

They use Point controls or 3D Point controls and those don’t do the switching around like position parameters do based on 2D/3D status ?

[Filip Vandueren]

Like Tomas said, behind the scenes position is always a 3D property, it’s just that when the layer is set to 2D, the 3rd value is 0.

Just like normal rotation is still called Z rotation for a 2D layer, it’s probably programmed so values don’t need to be copied around into different properties when a layer changes.

In Epressions, AE seem to do some logic so they see it as 2 vs -long arrays, but not in scripting alas.

[Filip Vandueren]

Sure, but do you want that uneven look ?

Because, minimizing it line by line looks like this:

[Filip Vandueren]

It seems like you are asking for the “line by line” look, which I don’t immediately know how to do with expressions, and is ugly (IMO).

Is the “global” look OK ?
So the entire text gets the minimum line-spacing (+ 10px margin) so no ascenders and descenders intersect anywhere?

[Filip Vandueren]

Hey Adam, by multiline text, do you mean, more than 2 lines?

I can’t immediately think of a way to achieve the third case with more than 2 layers.

Both the 2nd and 3rd are not very simple to implement with expressions while they take just a few seconds to do manually, so is it just an academic question of wether it is possible, or is it vital to be implemented in a template ?

Another question is, are you sure this is a desirable layout ?

[Filip Vandueren]

I quickly did a sourceRect on a text-layer, and watched what the numbers did when I changed alignment, and it made sense: left aligned text starts at around 0,0, center aligned puts the center at 0,0 (so left ends up in the negative range) and right aligned puts the right edge at 0,0 (so the left edge would be at -width)

Then it clicked that the left/width ratio would give something around 0, -0.5, -1

Depending on the font design there’s quite some margin of error, so I rounded and clamped. And multiplied by -2 to get 0,1,2 for the three options.

I’m pretty sure there are outlier cases (maybe with very thin fonts, very short words,…) where this breaks

[Filip Vandueren]

Hey Julian,

Interesting question and a cool approach. I hadn’t given it any though.

I had an idea, to just check the sourcerect width vs left ratio, and at first glance this simple test seems to work for me:

let sr=thisComp.layer("txt").sourceRectAtTime();
["left","centered","right"][clamp(Math.round(-2*sr.left/sr.width),0,2)];

[Filip Vandueren]

In 3D, it could be something like this:

https://openprocessing.org/sketch/1877427