Animating Text

Creating text within After Effects replies on a work flow and tool set borrowed from the other programs in the Adobe Suite. If you are familiar with using text in Photoshop or Illustrator, these tools will be at once familiar to you in AE. However, unlike everything else in AE, the properties within the main control panels for these tools (in this case the Character and Paragraph panels) cannot be fully animated from that location or under the standard timeline. Standard Transforms are available in the timeline - but offer a limited tool set compared with buried features in the text engine. These features are called Text Animators and they allow per-character animation with some wild twists.

Text Animators can only be activated for a text element via the Animate twirl-down found to the right of the layer's Text property in the timeline.

To begin, activate the T Textool on the main toolbar. Clicking inside the comp will place a cursor wherever you choose. Double-clicking the T instead will place the cursor in the center of the comp. Type your content and use the Character menu to audition various fonts and sizes.