Creating Your Source of Truth with Text Styling Expressions

By : tannachan@gmail.com

As of After Effects 17.0, you can use expressions to edit text styles in After Effects. Here’s why this would transform your workflow:

  1. Title Design: Link multiple text layers to one source of truth, for consistency and precision.
  2. Save time: Don’t waste your precious mental energy and hours of the day clicking into individual text layers, Character and Paragraph panels, or even expression sliders controlling your text.
  3. Create Motion Graphics Templates (mogrts): Link your source(s) of typographic truth to the Essential Graphics panel, so that you or others can edit them with flexibility in After Effects and Premiere.

Example:

You have three text layers. You want to maintain the same styling and source text for all, but you want to control Paragraph Alignment in the Essential Graphics panel.

For the skeptics: Yes, you can manually change the paragraph alignment, but you’re likely pushing the same copy to multiple comps at various sizes. The After Effects gods gave us new features so that maybe we can work more precisely and intelligently. Keep things simple for simpler projects, and go a little complex for more complex projects.

Recipe:

  1. Use expressions to link the three text layers to one master text layer (your source of truth).
  2. Create a Dropdown Menu Control with Paragraph Alignment options.

Add this expression to each of the three text layers:

var t = thisComp.layer("MASTER TITLE").text.sourceText;
var fontSize = t.style.fontSize;
var leading = t.style.leading;
style = t.style;
styleA = style.setFontSize(fontSize);
styleB = styleA.setText(t);
styleC = styleB.setLeading(leading);

Explanation, line by line:

var t = thisComp.layer("MASTER TITLE").text.sourceText;

Declare a variable, t, and return the value of your master text layer’s sourceText.

var fontSize = t.style.fontSize;

Declare a variable, fontSize, and return the fontSize of t.

var leading = t.style.leading;

Declare a variable, leading, and return the leading of t.

style = t.style;

Adding style to the end is the same as using getStyleAt(0); which means to get the style of t at Character Index 0. You can also use getStyleAt(n, x); to return the Character Index at Time (n = character index, x = time in seconds).

The variables styleA, styleB, and styleC combine Set Functions using the variables we declared above: fontSize, sourceText, and leading. I’ve separated each style for clarity, but you can also write everything in longform.

Now that we’ve linked the text layers to a single style, let’s create a Dropdown Menu Control so that we can access Left, Center, or Right paragraph alignment in the Essential Graphics Panel.

Use this expression on the opacity of your text layers (but make sure their visibility is still turned on):

var x = thisComp.layer("CONTROL").effect("paragraphAlign")("Menu").value;
if (x == 1) 100; else 0

Explanation, line by line:

var x = thisComp.layer("CONTROL").effect("paragraphAlign")("Menu").value;

Declare a variable x, and return the value of a Dropdown Menu Item. The value of a Dropdown Menu item is always a number, even if you rename the label.

Left = 1
Center = 2
Right = 3

if (x == 1) 100; else 0

If x is equal 1, the opacity will be 100. Otherwise, it will be zero.

Note that you may encounter the triple equals operator, or the strict equality operator, ===, e.g., x === 1. This operator is special because it tests for both value (e.g., 5) and type (e.g., number).

In this example, x === 1 will still work. However, if you type x === “1”, then the test will return false because the Dropdown Menu item values are always numbers, not strings.

Done! Now read more about text styling expressions over at Adobe.