Adobe After Effects CS3 - Manual (Page 290)

AFTER EFFECTS CS3
User Guide
285
Text composition methods
The appearance of text on the page depends on a complex interaction of processes called text composition. Using the
word spacing, letter spacing, and glyph spacing options you’ve selected, After Effects evaluates possible line breaks
and chooses the one that best supports the specified parameters.
After Effects offers two composition methods, which you choose from the Paragraph panel menu:
Adobe Single-line Composer Offers a traditional approach to composing text one line at a time. This option is useful
if you prefer to have manual control over how lines break. If spacing must be adjusted, the Single-line Composer first
tries to compress, rather than expand text.
Adobe Every-line Composer Considers a network of break points for a range of lines and thus can optimize earlier
lines in the paragraph in order to eliminate especially unattractive breaks later on. Working with multiple lines of
text results in more even spacing and fewer hyphens. The Every-line Composer approaches composition by identi-
fying possible breakpoints, evaluating them, and assigning a weighted penalty based on these principles:
• Highest importance is given to evenness of letter and word spacing. Possible breakpoints are evaluated and
penalized according to how much they deviate from optimal spacing.
• After breakpoint penalty values are identified for a range of lines, they are squared, magnifying the bad break-
points. The composer then uses the good breakpoints.
Animating text
About text animation
As with other layers in After Effects, you can animate text layers. However, text layers offer additional animation
options. You can animate text layers by using any of the following methods:
• Animate the Transform properties, as you would any other layer, to change the entire layer, not its text contents.
• Apply text animation presets.
• Animate the source text of the layer, so that the characters themselves change to different characters or use
different character or paragraph formats over time.
• Use text animators and selectors to animate many properties of individual characters or a range of characters.
To see a video tutorial on animating text, visit the Adobe website at www.adobe.com/go/vid0226 .
To smooth the edges and movement of animated text, enable motion blur for the text layer. See “Use motion blur”
on page 200 for more information.
See also
“About animation, keyframes, and expressions” on page 183
“Apply an effect or animation preset” on page 351
Text animation presets
Browse and apply text animation presets as you would any other animation presets.