From the course: After Effects Weekly

Controlling word spacing - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Weekly

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Controlling word spacing

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- [Instructor] Welcome to After Effects weekly with me, Eran Stern an isolated artist that sometimes uses After Effects to write lyrics of songs from the eighties. And in this case I want to change the spacing between the words just to make this paragraph a bit more legible. So you may expect to find a justification options in the paragraph panel like the ones that we have in Photoshop or Illustrator but those are not available here in After Effects. You also don't have anything in the Character Panel as well. Now, obviously you can control tracking and kerning but there is no slider or option to change the spacing between the words. So here is a quick work around that can help you to achieve that, if you so desire to do so. So what I'll do is I'm going to open up these texts over here, and I'm going to add a tracking animator to it. Now, by default, this tracker animator, if I'm going to change the tracking amount here is going to affect the characters. So the first thing I'll do, is open up the range selector here, I'll scroll down and under its Advanced Options, I'm going to change it from characters to words. And then under the second option here, the mode I'll change it from add to subtract. And this way it's going to actually subtract the behavior between each word and will allow me to use this tracking amount to add more space between the individual words or if I want to make them come closer together I can go to negative amount and make it look a little bit more condensed. And this is of course depending on the font that you are using. And of course the internal spacing within this font. So in my case, I may want to take these tracking amounts to 10. And since we've modified the settings again I'll remind you under the Advanced change it to Based On Words, change the Mode to Subtract. And this way you can control the spacing this time between the words. Now, just to show you what we've managed to achieve. This is the before, and this is after. So if you need to do this typography trick in After Effects, here is a quick way to achieve it. Now, go and write something that moved you and then move it. So it will move us. So many bad jokes. So little time.

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