[Gary Frewin]

Thanks Kalleheikki! That worked perfectly (also kicking myself for not spotting it).

☺
Gary

[Gary Frewin]

Hi Bouke,

It seems to work fine, I just tried a cell made up entirely of commas… all displayed fine. ☺

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Frewin]

Thanks for this! I am having one issues though.

I am using a reference to text from a CSV file, the comp.name chooses the row from the CSV. It works perfectly on everything, except when the char_count is less than the char_per_line i.e when there should only be a single line of text.

When this is the case, the expression returns an error saying ‘property of methods named ‘i’ in class ‘global’ is missing or does not exist’.

Had a fiddle, but can’t seem to figure this out.

var compIndex = thisComp.name.split(" - ")[0];
txt = footage("TOVDataTest.csv").dataValue([1,compIndex]);
char_count = txt.length;
char_per_line = Math.ceil(thisComp.layer("Controllers").effect("Characters per line")("Slider"));
lines = Math.ceil(char_count/(char_per_line));
done = 0;
esc = 0;
len =0;
row = char_per_line;
while (done == 0){
esc ++;
len+=row;
if (txt.length >= len+1){
for (i = len; i > len-row; i--) if (txt[i] == " ") break;
if (i > len-row){
txt=txt.substr(0,i) + "\r" + txt.substr(i+1,9999);
}
}
len = i;
if (esc>100){done=1}
}
txt

[Gary Frewin]

Hi Bouke,

Thanks for this, it helped me to solve it. Fortunately it required no extra coding or characters that would confuse the end-user. While searching for escape characters I stumbled on a stack overflow article that talked about UTF formatting on a csv.

All I had to do was go into excel and change the ‘save as’ file format from normal csv, to csv utf-8

Works perfectly now!
Thanks!

[Gary Frewin]

A further development.

In trying to import the text from the CSV, I’ve noticed some strange behaviour. Any help resolving them would be much appreciated.

If the user has included an apostrophe when creating the CSV (for example in It’s) no characters following the apostrophe are displayed in the textboxes when the CSV is first imported to the AFX project… however, if the user deletes the apostrophe, saves the cs, and let’s AFX refresh, then reinserts the apostrophe, when afx refreshes again the error goes away and the full sentence is displayed.

If the user tries to add an ellipsis in the csv (…) it doesn’t display at all, no matter what they do.

thoughts/solutions/workarounds?

Thanks
Gary

[Gary Frewin]

Ok, I have solved this it seems (by some miracle as I’m a pretty bad coder!). There are likely more elegant solutions, but here’s what I did:


var compIndex = thisComp.name.split(" - ")[0];
var textField = footage("TOVDataTest.csv").dataValue([1,compIndex]);
var thisText = ""
for (i = 0; i < textField.split("@@").length; i++){
thisText += textField.split("@@")[i] + "\n";
}


The solution was to forget about line breaks in the csv and use the split method array and a for loop with \n to create the lines.

Now the users simply duplicates the master template, names them all numerically, and the data is pulled in from the CSV.

[Gary Frewin]

Hi, thanks for the reply. It helped me realize my mistake. I’ll note it here for anyone looking in future. 🙂

I am using CS4, and simply importing the psd file to the project as ‘composition – croppedlayers’.

My problem was that rather than opening the composition I imported, I was copying all the layers from the Project Panel into a new composition (this resulted in all the layers becoming centered).

What I needed to do was open the composition that was created by AE when I imported the PSD. In that composition, all the layers were aligned properly.

Many thanks

[Gary Frewin]

Many thanks for your answer, I had forgot about the opacity map in the options menu. 🙂

Still, this has created a further issue. Objects in the background are now appearing in front of foreground objects whenever the camera is far away from that specific foreground object.

If I line up my camera and start moving toward a foreground particle that is being obsured by what should be a background particle, eventually the background one flips to being obscured by the foreground object, but only as the camera gets quite close. At all other times the background objects are in front of the foreground objects… lol, I’ve really lost it now.

….
🙂

[Gary Frewin]

Muchos thanks for your response. I think I’ll be able to get stuck in now that I know I’m not missing some simple fix. I’ll just take it one elements at a time and see where I get!

🙂

Tah!
Gary