[Filip Vandueren]

Text on a Path is the easier way if you can find (or make) a font that has the right shape for you.

[Filip Vandueren]

The website converted straight “quotes” to curly “quotes”.

JavaScript needs straight single or double quotes.

[Filip Vandueren]

Combine both values into the same style by chaining the methods:

newStyle = style.setFontSize(effect(“Size”)(“Slider”)).setLeading(effect(“Leading”)(“Slider”));

[Filip Vandueren]

Sometimes you can get away with doing the effects with the bezier warp effect, those parameters are all just 2D positions and can be easily adjusted with scripts and expressions.

[Filip Vandueren]

The only thing you can do with expressions of custom properties is valueAtTime();

The only thing you can do via scripting is apply Animation Presets, there’s no access to the actual values inside those properties.

[Filip Vandueren]

I thought something similar, but where can you find the list of characters that will form a ligature for a given font?

[Filip Vandueren]

Can you first check that in your project settings the JavaScript Engine is set to “JavaScript” ? Legacy extendscript would fail on the reduce() method.

Also if your after effects is not in English, name==“Checkbox” would be a bad check.

[Filip Vandueren]

I think making an array of the checkboxes first is a good idea,
maybe something along these lines:

For opacity (hiding text-layers):

controls = thisComp.layer("Null 1")("Effects");
checks = [];
for (i=1; i <=controls.numProperties; i++) {
	if (controls(i)(1).name=="Checkbox") checks.push(controls(i)(1).value);
}
firstTextLayerIndex=2;
myIndex = index-firstTextLayerIndex;
checks[myIndex]*100;

For position (text-layers):

controls = thisComp.layer("Null 1")("Effects");
checks = [];
for (i=1; i <= controls.numProperties; i++) {
	if (controls(i)(1).name=="Checkbox") checks.push(controls(i)(1).value);
}
numActive = checks.reduce((a,b) => a+b ,0);
firstTextLayerIndex=2;
myIndex = index-firstTextLayerIndex;
linespacing = 980/numActive;
top = 0;
for(i=0; i < myIndex; i++) {
	if (checks[i]) top+=linespacing;
}
thisComp.layer(firstTextLayerIndex).position + [0,top];

Of course this is assuming the texts are never breaking to be more than 1 line high, that would make it a bit more complex, looping through all the sourceRectAtTimes to calculate a better top-value.

[Filip Vandueren]

There is no way for javascript to know. Javascript deals in strings, and lets the renderer decide how to display that (Ligatures or not, for example), So I think it’s the same as in the Browser: you can’t know.

I don’t know if it totally breaks legibility but is disabling ligatures an option ?

[Filip Vandueren]

This version is better if you experience glitches: (sometimes doing % and / operations on time gives glitchy results, it depends on the framerate. using timeToFrames() can fix that)

seedRandom(index,true);
moveDistance = 100;
moveEvery = 25;
startPos = [960,540];
moves=[startPos];
possibleMoves = [[1,0],[-1,0],[0,1],[0,-1]];
st = thisLayer.startTime;
// create all moves up front
for (i=0; i<timeToFrames(thisComp.duration - st); i+=moveEvery) {
	move = possibleMoves[ Math.floor(random(4)) ];
	lastPos = moves[moves.length-1];
	newPos = lastPos + move*moveDistance;
	moves.push(newPos);
}
f=timeToFrames(time-st);
t=f%moveEvery;
step = Math.floor(f/moveEvery);
ease( t, 0, moveEvery, moves[step], moves[step+1]);