Feature Focus: Text Animation of Character Offset with Preserve Case & Digits now supports KS X 1001

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Text Animation of Character Offset with Range Type Preserve Case & Digits has been enhanced in After Effects Beta 22.4 (41) to include the coded character set KS X 1001 which supports hangul and hanja characters.

You can read more about this particular character set here: KS_X_1001 

Just to review, the Range Type Preserve Case & Digits defines a set of Unicode range groups whereby when After Effects adds a positive or negative offset to the base character it is animating the resulting Unicode character is wrapped around so it stays within the same Unicode range group as the base character.

For example, consider the upper case Latin letter "Z" which is part of a Unicode range group for upper case Latin letters that spans from "A" to "Z". When we add one with the Character Offset we generate an upper case Latin "A" instead of getting the next Unicode character after "Z" which is the Left Square Bracket "[". Neat, eh?

With Character Offset Range Type Full Unicode there is no constraint so with the right starting base character and a big enough Character Offset one can end up with some pretty unusual characters most of which are probably not even supported by the applied font.

All this is driven by a table of Unicode range groups which I thought you might enjoy seeing.

Douglas Waterfall
After Effects Engineering

[hellopaul4]

On the subject of text animation, would it be possible to have AE recognise non-breaking spaces and some kind of "non-breaking return" to group words and lines together? This would enable word-by-word/line-by-line animations to bring on more than one word/line at a time, for example:

If I have an animated bunch of text saying:

Fred, Bill, Kate, Mary Beth, John, Claire

....and I want each name to appear one by one, there's no way (if I use a Range Selector > Based On > Words) of keeing "Mary Beth" together. It'd be lovely if using a non-breaking space there would tell AE to treat "Mary Beth" as one word.

Something similar would also be great for line-by-line animations, for something like this:

- First thing

- Second thing

- Third thing, that's much longer than the other things, so much so that it wraps to another line/lines, even though it's only one thing and should all come on at the same time, not as two (or more) separate animations. Maybe there is an unsed Unicode "carriage return" or "line feed" type of character that could be used for this, to tell AE that it's not actually separate lines, but one paragraph?

- Fourth thing

How about we add another option in the "Based On" pop-up: Paragraph? That way, if we have a chunk of Paragraph Text, AE can see a whole paragraph as one thing, then only step to the next animation when it sees an actual typed "return" character rather than a line break that AE adds to wrap paragraph text around? Wouldn't that be awesome?!