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hellopaul4
hellopaul4
Inspiring
October 23, 2023
Open for Voting

Character Styles palette for AE?

  • October 23, 2023
  • 6 replies
  • 519 views

I think I may have suggested this many years ago, but it's worth another go:


What are the chances of seeing a character/paragraph style palette in AE? I'm sure I'm not alone in finding the method of copying/pasting a bit of text from a "desired" style into a new text layer, before deleting it and pasting/typing some unformatted text, so it matches the desired style. With the introduction, some time ago, of the ability to access text styles/fonts/etc via scripting/expressions, I'd have thought it wouldn't be too hard to implement an InDesign/Illustrator character style palette. Wouldn't that be nice?

 

(I know I could probably do this using mogrt templates and things, but that's an awkward and time-consuming workaround).

    6 replies

    hellopaul4
    hellopaul4Author
    Inspiring
    August 21, 2026

    This was a feature request for Character Styles in After Effects I created many years ago, but has gone a bit silent, so I’m trying to revive it.

    I know it works differently from AI, PS, ID etc, but it really would be wonderful to be able to assign character styles to individual words/sentences etc. (within the same layer - it looks like the StyleLink plugin assigns styles to whole layers - unless I’m mistaken?). I know I could possibly achieve this using expressions (with the relatively new text style expressions) and range selectors, but it’d be very cumbersome.

    As an example, I’m working on a job with ~12 blocks of text appearing, and the client has asked for individual phrases/words within each of the text blocks to be highlighted. If I could set a ‘highlight style’ (eg. bold, yellow) then if, after I’ve set up the many highlighted chunks of text, the client says ‘could we have all of those in red italic please?’, then I could just edit the style, just like I’d do in InDesign.

    Any thoughts, anyone? Upvote 👆, upvote👆!

    Warren Heaton
    Community Expert
    Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 23, 2026

    Hi, ​@hellopaul4:

    If we expand a Text Layer, we can set a keyframe for Source and then use Animation > Save Animation Preset to have the current Character panel and Paragraph panel settings.  Then use Animation > Apple Animation Preset or go to the User Presets in the Effects & Presets panel to apply it to other Text Layers.  Animation Presets are .ffx files that can be shared with other After Effects users as well.

    However, having InDesign Character Styles and InDesign Paragraph Styles (or even Premiere Track Styles) in After Effects all this time would have been great.

    Have you had a chance to try the AI Assistant in After Effects (Beta)?

    It’s pretty good at things like, “Change the text in Layer 5 to italic with a red fill” or “Change the fill color off all the even numbered text color to red.”  Having a Style option would still be nice for being able to save Styles and call them up later, but at least this provides a pretty good work around.

     

     

     - Warren

    hellopaul4
    hellopaul4Author
    Inspiring
    August 23, 2026

    Hi ​@Warren Heaton 

    Thanks, and while these are indeed quite good workarounds that I’ve used before (apart from using the AI assistant for text things - I’ve used it for other things but find it SO slow!), they don’t enable things like:

    • Multiple styles on the same layer (unless I apply Animation Presets and restrict the areas using the Range Selector which is a bit tedious, and would obviously break if I then edited the text)
    • Updating a style and having that updated style cascade across all instances of that style in my project

    Only an InDesign/AI kind of styles workflow could achieve this, which would be nice.

      _nicdean
      Community Expert
      _nicdeanCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      October 23, 2023

      I like this idea. There's also a free tool for copy + pasting text styles between layers called Style Bandit.

        hellopaul4
        hellopaul4Author
        Inspiring
        October 23, 2023

        We can live in hope...maybe if enough people upvote my idea (hint! hint!)!

          Mylenium
          Mylenium
          Legend
          October 23, 2023
          quote

          What are the chances of seeing a character/paragraph style palette in AE?

           

          Slim at best? Just saying. There's so much dysfunctional stuff with text layers, including text style expressions, it probably wouldn't make much sense to have a palette until these things have been ironed out.

           

          Mylenium

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