CC Library Paragraph and Character Styles in After Effects?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
February 11, 2021
5 replies
684 views

I'm a long-time InDesign user trying to help my company's motion graphics team get more use out the CC libraries that our print designers use all the time. We have robust Paragraph and Character Styles in our CC libraries, but I can't find any definitive information about whether they are accessible in After Effects or not. They appear greyed out in the Library panel, so I'm thinking they aren't usable but that seems crazy that something so useful would be cut off from a group who still uses type so much.

Am I missing something or are After Effects users really limited to shared colors and graphics in CC libraries?

How to

Correct answer Mylenium

AE has a completely different text engine that hasn't anything to do with ID's, PS's or AI's versions. This stuff is simply not available nor would it make that much sense, to be honest. All video stuff is pixel-based and the most well-crafted print kerning can look pretty crappy when converted for on-screen work. Just accept the limitations and learn to work within them. No point wasting your energy on "fighting the system", as it were. You'll get used to it...

Mylenium

hellopaul4

Inspiring

I think I’d previously (many years ago) created a feature request for Character Styles in After Effects. 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 that 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👆!

creat11vedirector

Participant

There seems to be a plugin for this: https://promptymac.gumroad.com/l/stylelink
Is that what you were looking for?

L

lord 6 infamous

Participating Frequently

adobe community answers always feel like gaslighting. I understand there are differences but wow i cant even quickly apply a font style from my library which would be very helpful.

MyleniumCorrect answer

Legend

AE has a completely different text engine that hasn't anything to do with ID's, PS's or AI's versions. This stuff is simply not available nor would it make that much sense, to be honest. All video stuff is pixel-based and the most well-crafted print kerning can look pretty crappy when converted for on-screen work. Just accept the limitations and learn to work within them. No point wasting your energy on "fighting the system", as it were. You'll get used to it...

Mylenium

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

The paragraph and character settings are limited to what you see in the Paragraph and Character pannels. If you need precise typography the best thing to do is to set the type in Illustrator, and for the very best results with no other modifications, convert the AI type to Outlines.

If you need to use Text animators you'll have to adjust the kerning, leading, and paragraph styles by hand.

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