I've worked out an animation preset that should get you close to what you want.

It's not possible using just Text Animators but I hacked my way around that by tying it to an expression on the text layer's Source Text property to replace the last character in the string with a blinking cursor symbol.  If you want to change the cursor symbol to something else you can change it in the Source Text expression.  It's currently a pipe symbol.

I put in some extra effort so that the cursor character can be scaled independently from the rest of the text (if you want a blinking block or the pipe symbol to be elongated).  The Cursor Position range selector in the text animator needs to be animated from 1 to the source text's length + 1 so that the cursor is visible before the text begins to appear and it doesn't replace the last character.

You can download the preset here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1950339/BlinkingCursor.ffx

Hopefully this works for your purposes.  Let me know if there's any trouble!

-D

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 1:05 PM, dennis@reelsolutions.com <dennis@reelsolutions.com> wrote:

Thanks Chris and Phil,

Really? this can't be done natively in AE? Hard to believe that such an obvious effect can't be done without either manually keyframing (really painful on a lot of type - with editing changes coming continuously), or buying a $299 plugin - which will probably be the route I take due to the timing of the Red Giant sale today... Downside to the plugin approach is that you have to apply the effect to a solid and you can't use the nice type features built-in to After Effects.

I've always done this with keyframes, but every time I do it, I'm thinking there's got to be a better way.

I may try making a custom font, I've been down that rabbit hole before...

-Dennis Wilkins

On Dec 12, 2011, at 11:40 PM, Chris Bator wrote:

Well, you said easy… If you have it, Text Typewriter in Image Lounge has a blinking vertical bar cursor option that should work…

-chris

--

chris bator

cbator@mac.com

http://www.ui.somebug.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbator

interactive and motion design

On Dec 12, 2011, at 10:14 PM, dennis@reelsolutions.com wrote:

Hi All,

Seems like this should be easy, but I haven't found a solution. I'm trying to add a blinking vertical cursor line in front of text as it's being typed. I've tried a couple different solutions; The "Word Processor" Text animation preset, as well as the presets/expressions via this tutorial: http://jordanshipman.lt11.com/2011/07/21/free-text-animation-preset-for-after-effects/.

- The vertical line "Character Value" is 124.

The problem with both of these is that when you hit a space, the cursor disappears, even though the Units is set to Index, and "Based on" is set to Characters.

Any ideas on how to approach this? I'd like to use index versus percentage and not have to manually keyframe this.

Thanks for any tips!

Dennis Wilkins
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