Table of Contents
Advertisement
Chapter 13: Text
Creating text
About text layers
With After Effects, you can add text to layers with flexibility and precision. You can create and edit text directly on-
screen in the Composition panel and quickly change the font, style, size, and color of the text. You can apply changes
to individual characters and set formatting options for entire paragraphs, including alignment, justification, and
word wrapping. In addition to all of these style features, After Effects provides tools for easily animating specific
characters and features such as text opacity and hue.
After Effects provides a wide range of text features accessible through the Tools, Character, and Paragraph panels.
You can add horizontal or vertical text anywhere in a composition. After Effects uses two types of text: point text and
paragraph text. Point text is useful for entering a single word or a line of characters; paragraph text is useful for
entering and formatting the text as one or more paragraphs.
Vertical and horizontal point text (left) and paragraph text in a bounding box (right)
In many ways, text layers are just like any other layer in After Effects. You can apply effects and expressions to text
layers, animate them, designate them as 3D layers, and edit the 3D text while viewing it in multiple views. As with
layers imported from Adobe Illustrator, text layers are continuously rasterized, so when you scale the layer or resize
the text, it retains crisp, resolution-independent edges. The main differences between text layers and other layers are
that you cannot open a text layer in its own Layer panel, and that you can animate the text in a text layer using special
text animator properties and selectors. (See "To animate text with text animator groups" on page 296.)
You can copy text from other applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, or any text
editor, and paste it into a text layer in After Effects. Because After Effects also supports Unicode characters, you can
copy and paste these characters between After Effects and any other application that also supports Unicode (which
includes all Adobe applications).
For additional information, go to Adobe Studio on the Adobe website.
Adobe periodically provides updates to software and Help. To check for updates, click the Preferences button
Adobe Help Center, and then click Check For Updates. Follow the on-screen instructions.
To enter point text
When you enter point text, each line of text is independent—the length of a line increases or decreases as you edit
the text, but it doesn't wrap to the next line. The text you enter appears in a new text layer.
283
in
Hide quick links:
Advertisement
Table of Contents
