After Effects Animator

Hello,

I'm currently creating lots of animated letters in AE for a local museum project. To do this I use the animator and then create a start and end point using the range selector to make each line appear over x time. My problem is, when I set a length for a line to appear of 4 seconds lets say, sometimes this works perfectly and the characters appear one by one, but other times due to the amount of characters, some characters appear in 2's instead of individually. To solve this I just extend the length of the range until this doesn't happen. However, sometimes when I do this, some letters appear and then disappear two frames later, and then reappear again, almost as though now the range has too much time and is stalling by taking away letters, instead of waiting for the next character?. Is there a way to simply make each character appear individually over time, without these problems? Specifically if the length of the range is sufficient to show each characters more than 1 frame apart.

Any help would be appreciated as each letter consists of a plethora of lines and thus this gets tedious for me when tweaking each line so much. Has to be a better way!

Thank you for any help!

Alex