[René Pedersen]

Amazing preset. I was told again and again it was impossible to get the size of individual lines in a text box since sourceRectAtTime uses the boundary of the entire text box.

I am having problems utilizing the full potential though since I cant figure out what the Left – Top value is relative to.

I am trying to create a coloured box for just one of the lines in a text box that automatically resizes when I change the text. Therefore I changed the sourceSubRect Helper to be based on Lines instead of characters.

And I have added a shape layer with a path (and a fill) and added this code from the mask path that the preset generates to the path.

pos=thisComp.layer("Text").effect("Left - Top")("Point"); //I have pickwhipped the effect to the text-layer.
dim=thisComp.layer("Text").effect("Width - Height")("Point");
pts=[
pos,
pos+[dim[0],0],
pos+dim,
pos+[0,dim[1]]
];
createPath(pts,[],[],true);

It creates a perfect sized box for my line, but I cant really figure out how to position it.

When I have marked the Text layer I can see that the mask created is positioned correct, but if I try to use the points from “Left – Top” in the position of the TextBox/Shape Layer it is placed outside of the comps boundaries.

My text layer is positioned at x = 0 and y = 0 and the anchor point on both my Text layer and Shape layer is placed top left with this expression

sourceSize = thisLayer.sourceRectAtTime(time, false);
T = sourceSize.top;
L = sourceSize.left;
[L , T]

The left value always ends up around -515 and -519 (depending on the text) but I have no idea how to use these values.

[René Pedersen]

Hi

The last couple of days I have been – unsuccessfully – trying to expand this old expression.

The thing is that I don’t want to count active layers, but count all layers that has the term BlueBox in its name.

I remembered an expression I had used before from that uses a keyword (not to get a number, but to set a width) https://ukramedia.com/how-to-automatically-get-the-size-of-many-layers/

keyword = “ukramedia”;

widthList = [];

for(i = 1; i <= thisComp.numLayers; i++) {

layerPath = thisComp.layer(i);

layerWidth = layerPath.sourceRectAtTime().width;

if(layerPath.name.match(keyword)) {widthList.push(layerWidth)} else {};

}

Math.max(…widthList) + 100

But when I try to merge the expressions it doesn’t work. This is what I tried – any idea what am I doing wrong?

n = 0;

keyword = “BlueBox”

for (i = 1; i < index; i++)

layerPath = thisComp.layer(i)

if (layerPath.name.match(keyword))

n++;