Creating and editing text layers – Adobe After Effects User Manual
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Creating and editing text layers
About text layers
Best practices for creating text and vector graphics for video
Scripts and expressions for working with text
Enter point text
Enter paragraph text
Select and edit text in text layers
Resize a text bounding box
Move a text layer
Convert point or paragraph text
Change the direction of text
Convert text from Photoshop to editable text
About text layers
You can add text to a composition using text layers. Text layers are useful for many purposes, including animated titles, lower thirds, credit rolls,
and dynamic typography.
You can animate the properties of entire text layers or the properties of individual characters, such as color, size, and position. You animate text
using text animator properties and selectors. 3D text layers can optionally contain 3D sublayers, one for each character. (See Animate text with
text animators and Per-character 3D text properties.)
Text layers are synthetic layers, meaning that a text layer does not use a footage item as its source—though you can convert text information from
some footage items into text layers. Text layers are also vector layers. As with shape layers and other vector layers, text layers are always
continuously rasterized, so when you scale the layer or resize the text, it retains crisp, resolution-independent edges. You cannot open a text layer
in its own Layer panel, but you can work with text layers in the Composition panel.
After Effects uses two kinds 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)
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).
Text formatting is included in the Source Text property. Use the Source Text property to animate formatting and to change the characters
themselves (for example, change the letter b to the letter c).
Sequential frames in which Source Text has been animated
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