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Julio Dojo
Julio Dojo
Participating Frequently
January 31, 2022
Question

AE: Automatic Hyphenation (Dictionary logic)

  • January 31, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 414 views

Hello Community,

Dear After Effects Team @Adobe

 

If I drag open a textbox in After Effects there will be some sort of character separation

when text overflows the textbox, but it doesn't hyphenate according to a dictionary (e.g InDesign).

 

Are there plans to implement automatic hyphenation into After Effects? If not,

are there any plugins or expression code that could accomplish this sort of thing?

I think an expression using the sourceRectAtTime could at least insert a hyphen "-"

when text overflows the textbox. I only don't know how to code it.

 

Best regards

Julio

    1 reply

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    January 31, 2022

    You pretty much answered your own question: If it's supposed to work on actual grammar rules, someoen would have to create a script and the associated dictionary logic for each language. I'm not aware that any such thing exists. Of course all sorts of expressions can be created to mimic such a behavior, but at the end of the day unless you use the same three words over and over the effort to type in all the rules for the dictionary as well as the words themselves would far outweigh the time it takes to manualyl format the text. Could such a feature be created? Quite possible, but I wouldn't keep my hopes up. InDesign is pretty much the only program where hyphenation actually works as expected whiel Photoshop and Illustrator struggle with it as well. If they can't get it right, we're a far cry from seeing such stuff in AE, even more so since AE's entire text engine works different from those other programs...

     

    Mylenium

    Julio Dojo
    Julio DojoAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    February 1, 2022

    Hey Mylenium,

     

    thanks for the response.

    Manually preformatting the text isn't an option, since I am automatically reading-in text from a spreadsheet into text layers in After Effects, sporting several hundred or sometimes thousand rows of text in the spreadsheet all different in length.

    Adjusting them all manually, while also making sure hyphenation happens at the right spot - since different templates use different sized textboxes - would also take me forever. Hence not an option.

     

    During my research I came across http://hunspell.github.io/ which is allready compatible with InDesing, providing all the dictionaries and grammar rules. So with this and the new Universal Text Engine developers should have a great stating point.

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