equidistance between the letters of a word

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
May 16, 2020
2 replies
641 views

Hello. I have a composition that animates the letters of a word. The word is made up of 10 letters and I need each letter to be anchored exactly on a specific position as in the figure below. So far I have created a comp with 10 precomps each containing a letter and so I have been able to position it at will. I have to change the word many times, is there a way to be able to type the whole word and not every single letter? I have not found text attributes that solve the problem because each letter has a different width: the "A" is different from the "I", etc. Thanks.

How to

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Robi_bAuthor

Participant

In the first row the example word must be made equidistant. In the second row, the current composition with the word created from each letter entered manually.

I would prefer to use an Arial type font. Not even the Courier allows exact equidistant letters.

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Rick Gerard

Community Expert

You just have to pick a true monotype font. Here's one that kind of looks like Arial that is in your Adobe Type Kit. This is what it looks like:

Except for the descenders in small letters like j and y, the font is a true monotype. The basic Courier is a monospaced font. You'll have to deal with descenders in lower case letters to fit them in cubes but this took about 3 minutes to do with one rounded rectangle, two repeaters, some parenting to make it easy to move the combined graphic around, and a little finesse with the Character Pannel's Leading and Tracking controls.

Trying to do this with expressions and individual letters or a regular font would be a nightmare. There are a fair amount of monospaced fonts available and if all you need is capital letters your job is easy. You can even fix the descenders in g, j, and y by adjusting the baseline shift and possibly the scale.

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Robi_bAuthor

Participant

Thanks for the advice and I think I will use a monospace font.

This will constrain my stylistic choice, but I consider it an excellent compromise!

I don't know the expressions, but I wondered if it was not possible through a script to take a letter inside another comp, choosing (an expression for each composition-letter) from time to time a different letter of the whole word.

Eg:
comp-whole-word composed of text-layer: "ABCDEF ..."
comp-single1 an expression that picks up the first letter of the text-layer in the comp-whole-word
comp-single2 an expression that picks up the second letter of the text-layer in the comp-whole-word
comp-single3 an expression that picks up the third letter of the text-layer in the comp-whole-word
.
.
.
etc.

In the Final-comp I'm going to position each comp-singleX at will.
This way I'm free to choose any font.

I do not know if I have been clear or at least if it can be done.

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Rick Gerard

Community Expert

You forgot to embed an image.

If you want equal spacing between letters the easiest way to do that is to use a monospaced font like Courier.

Other than that, you'll need to develop a script that sets the baseline to zero, sets a left paragraph style, and creates a new text layer for each letter in a word.

A screenshot of what you are trying to do wold help.

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