MIME-Version: 1.0
Sender: richatloopcorp@gmail.com
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:49:34 +0100
Message-ID: <CAE1ycsfFCKjHcV5R=NZLpP9Caq383kregi5YFuLfkbjShfPLFA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Text questions
From: Richard Green <Rich@loopcorp.com>
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi all

I've been asked some text and font questions by a client but my use of
AE tends to be for imagery not MoGraph so I'm sure somebody here will
have better advice. One thing his question made me realise is that you
can't animate font size on a text layer, how crazy is that? OK, you
can scale but I thought text layers were supposed to unlock loads of
great typography animation capabilities. Anyhow, I'm pasting his
questions here, I feel like there's bound to be some great little
plug-in out there to handle the scaling issue but I don't look for
those kind of plugs!

>> I have also seen that AE may have difficulty with opentype fonts. Can you
>> confirm if this is the case with AE6 ??"

I just tried loading a couple of OpenType fonts via Font Agent Pro and
sure enough, AE6 doesn't seem to see them. Is that correct?

>> I'm wondering if AE6 has an auto font sizing feature a bit like powerpoint
>> and if it doesn't can we use Expressions to look at this issue. I have
>> looked it up and expressions don't appear to be able to change font size
>> but you can have multiple text areas with different preset font sizes that
>> you could select and put in place depending on desired outcome. Do you
>> know any more than this?

The issue here is that it's an interactive project where users will
input the text that ends up in the comp. So they would like to draw
out a box and, if the user enters too much text, it will automatically
scale down to fit. The only way I can see to control font size via
expressions is with ye olde Basic Text effect but this where I can
imagine there being a plug-in solution - anyone? Thanks a lot.

---
Cheers
Rich

www.loopcorp.com