Simple text wrap expression

[master_shake91]

Hello,

I'm wondering if anyone in the community would know how or be able to point me to some sort of documentation or tutorial to achieve this effect with the text.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bto77mphjLL/

How to get the text to dynamically respond, drop down and or wrap to shape layers as you move them over the text. 

Thanks!

[Rick Gerard]

After Effects will let you click and drag a box that will act as a container that wraps text. You can set keyframes for text but they will always behold keyframes. Text animators do not have access to the text area box. You could set a keyframe on every frame as you resize and reposition the text box but that would be extremely tedious and difficult to control. 

The only other option would be to create a different text box on different layers and use the text animators to flow text into multiple layers. Basically, every rectangle that needs to be filled with text would have to be a separate text layer and you would have to cut between the layers. It would probably take me the better part of a day to reproduce that Instagram video. 

By far the easiest way to reproduce a video that shows text flowing into different columns and wrapping around images is to use a good screen recording program like ScreenFlow (OSX) and open up an app like In Design or even Word and start moving the text around on the page. Speed up your screen recording and you're basically done.

[angie_taylor]

The only ways I can think of doing anything remotely similar, as well as what Rick says are;

a) You can animate the Alignment options using the Source Text property. However, the letters will not interpolate in the way you see here, they will just jump from Left Aligned to Right Aligned suddenly. But they will wrap around the edges like they do here. You might need to create multiple boxes.

b) I'm thinking you could achieve this effect using path text? If you put each line of text on its own horizontal path, you could use the Alignment options and the first/ last margin options to animate the lines individually? A bit of a faff but a workaround that might be useful?

[Mylenium]

There's nothing simple about text wrapping. That's why (print) layout tools have a whole slew of tools for dealing with typographically correct typesetting and newspapers aren't designed in simple text editors. You have a wrong assumption about the process. As my colleagues already pointed out, this will require a completely different approach to fake it in AE and it's a whole lot of work, not some "simple text wrap expression". If you can be more specific about what needs to be done I'm sure we can advise more specifically, but don't expect anyone to tell you how to re-create a whole text layout engine in expressions. Anyone in their right mind would only tackle this on an "as needed" basis or else this becomes an endless thing.

Mylenium

[master_shake91]

Hello, thanks to everyone chiming in.

So I was able to get kind of close using the expression from this other forum post:

https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/paragraph-text-box-control-reversed/

However, I think further scripting is needed. While I believe it would not be exactly what I'm looking to do it may come close and would likely be enough.

I think I need to figure out how to lean on the above expression but be able to calculate the distance between each of the four points on the path I drew behind the text. Then pipe all four of those distances somehow into that expression.

If possible, this way, I can parent nulls to each path point and hopefully, the text will dynamically drop down to another line. Additionally, I think some how connecting the scale of the text in a text animator property would help too.

This might cut down keyframing a fair bit.

Unfortunately, this is the extent of my expression know-how, if anyone more experienced with expressions has any insight that would be super appreciated.

[Mylenium]

Unless it's really required, start by not using shape layers/ mask paths. Retrieving the point data alone adds an extra layer of expression code. If possible, use scale animation on a simple solid or a parametric shape layer rectangle's size properties. Dropping down lines doesn't require any fancy math as it would merely be the distance from one edge to the other edge with the space inbetween quantized to an imaginary line grid and the math for that could be as simple as Math.floor(distance/gridspacing)*charactercount and then some simple string code to insert the carriage returns. This is pseudo code, obviously, but that's the basic drill. Things only get more complicated if the character count per line also needs to be considered.

Mylenium