Expose Paragraph Text Box Width/Height for Expressions

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 28, 2022
8 replies
2986 views

It's currently impossible within expressions to set the width or height of a Paragraph Text box.

This would be a massively helpful feature for text-based templates and animations.

Workflow

S

Saariko2

Known Participant

i agree, this would be great to have

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

I could be wrong but there seems to be no way to access the size of a Text Box by expressions. That would be a nice feature request.

hall123456

Known Participant

Definitely need this!

P

Philippe Fontaine

Participant

We need access to the bounding box of paragraph text by expression. If this were possible, we could flexibly change the width and height of paragraph texts directly. Furthermore, a precise setting of the size of the text box would be possible (currently, the box can only be set manually).
Currently we can only change the width of a paragraph text by scaling. But this also changes the size of the font. As a workaround we adjust the font size again: e.g. var txtFontSize = 100 * (100/transform.scale[0]);
All these workarounds cause complicated solutions.

K

kzandy

Participant

OMG, why does this not exist? Honestly, if a box is created it shouldn't even Just be exposed to expressions, it should be exposed to the user.
Right now, the way it works is Kind of dumb. You can move the text box completely independently of the layer's position and anchor point. Well, that's all fine and all IF the user has access to the box's transforms as well. Shouldn't it work just like a shape? The shape Layer itself has transforms for the layer, but a rectangle shape within that layer Also has it's own properties like size, position, and an entirely new set of transforms just for that object.

This is how a paragraph text box should also work. It would be even better if you just let us wrap text inside a shape layer so it isn't even limited to just a rectangle. I mean, powerpoint has that. If powerpoint can do it, AE should be able to do it right? That's always a disappointing realization.