Fixed Position Timer in After Effects

[Talia Gutman]

Hi, I am creating a countdown timer which has a circle around it. The circle filled as the time goes by.

Everything is going great except that as the timer digits change - the numbers aren't aligned in the center of the circle. 

I don't want to go through every second and adjust manually the position using key frames... I am looking for an expression or other automatic solution for evey second.

[Mylenium]

Long and short: Nope. The only way to fix this would be to use a monospaced font and/ or tabular numbers in an OpenType font. It's the nature of type design - each glyph may have a different pre- and post kerning as well as numbers like 6 and 9 may have a baseline offset built in to look "nice" next to other numbers. Only using a font (or subset) specifically designed to have a fixed area can compensate for that. otherwise you indeed have to animate a few things/ use multiple layer segments pieced together with individual alignment options.

Mylenium

[Talia Gutman]

Thanks for the reply,

I thought I'm losing my mind trying to find a solution for the last 7 hours.

[Martin_Ritter]

Wouldn't sourceRectAtTime() come in handy here?

It should update on each number and the center point of it should be center of the mumber, too. At least for x. 

*Martin

[Mike_Abbott]

Are you sure you're using centered paragraph alignment here - not left aligned?
Those 3 examples look left aligned to me...

[Rick Gerard]

Center Justified text will keep the center if the text layer in the same spot but the appearance and position of the digits will only remain constant if you use a monospaced font. Courier Bold is monospaced and fairly close to your font.

[Andrew Yoole]

There's free monospaced fonts at FontSquirrel, and lots of others elsewhere no doubt.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/classification/monospaced

As mentioned above, make sure your text is also centre-justified.

[Matt M.]

Digit Fiddler from Plugin Everything does this exact thing -- lets you make timers and apply a "mono spacing" effect to ensure that the numbers don't wiggle from one character to the other.  Highly recommended!

https://aescripts.com/digit-fiddler/