Parented Text Styles: Original Proportions of Child Text Still Visible?

Report · Feb 28, 2023

Hi all,

Not sure if this is a bug or if I'm somehow doing something wrong, but either way it's really annoying.

So when it comes to text, whenever possile I like to parent attributes to sliders (usually because it's a template comp in a massive project), so I can adjust things like font size, tracking, leading, and so on in one place and have it propagate everywhere. That, in turn, means that text objects throughout the project will inherit their style attributes (pretty much everything except the SourceText value itself).

Only one problem: when I control a text object's attributes with an expression, if the text's original attributes were different, visually it'll appear to assume the new attributes, but the actual text won't line up with what I can see. (So in other words, if the tracking is increased, the letters will appear spaced farther apart, but when I click to edit the text, the actual text (which I can't see) will still have the "actual" tracking value, and if I click what looks like a space and start typing it'll actually be a letter.

I feel like I'm explaining this poorly, but the functional impact to this is it's next to impossible to work with parented text because of this. Am I the only one this happens to? Is there a way to fix this?

Here's an example. Here, the layer "Original Text" shows what the original text looks like. The other layer shows what happens when I parent attributes to something else--size and tracking have both been changed, and where the cursor is is where AE says the line ends, even though we can plainly see the text is a lot wider than that. I've also attached this comp so you can see exactly how I do it.

Report · Feb 28, 2023

This is as it is supposed to work. The custom styling is applied after the initial text formatting and the character and paragraph panel are based on the global Adobe font engine, not AE specific stuff. Nothing you can do about it.

Mylenium