relative positioning of text objects?

Hi, all --

I'm fairly new to Motion, but as luck would have it, I'm on a deadline ... :O

My question is:
Is it possible to automatically position one object RELATIVE to another object?

Here are the specifics ...
I'm creating about 75 different versions of a title animation [using AutoMotion, Digital Heaven's excellent batch versioning utility]. I want to have a certain amount of horizontal space between two of the text objects (which are both left-justified). However, the amount of text (and the width of the bounding box) varies from one version to another. If the two text objects are positioned at absolute coordinates, as is usual, then the subjective spacing between them varies, depending on the text.

In essense, if text object A is shorter, I want to position the text object B further to the left. If text A is longer, I want to position text B further to the right. (Because of the design in question, I do need to keep them as two separate objects.)

Any insights? Any help is much appreciated!

Best,
Ron D.

I don't think so - you would do this in AE with an expression, which Motion does not have.
Mark

Thank you. Probably so. :|

Any other thoughts, anyone?

While, like Mark says, this could be acomplished in AE with expressions.... the expressions would have to be much more complex than what it seems. First, you would need to measure the length of a text string (Expressions can do that), then try to figure out how to convert that to an useful number you could use to substract from the Object B's position (also doable, but requires quite some testing to get the math right) and then the final problem: for any font that's not monospaced (like Courier, for instance) the actual length of text is not only a consequence of the amount of characters, but also of the particular characters you used. Quite complicated, isn't it?

Now that I think of it: AE could offer another alternative through expressions. Text A is a string (you could call it TextA). Same for Text B. Then you write a simple expression in After Effects Source text property that does TextA + TextB. You know what? Text B will appear next to Text A, regardless of length! I don't know if that would be useful in the context of what you're doing.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

You definitely can't do this with Motion at the moment, sorry Ron.

For the future, one option would be for Motion to have some sort of dynamic positioning, so text objects could be linked together and positioned according to the width of the parent object.

The other (slightly less flexible) option would be to have two text styles in the same text object. Motion can do this now but AutoMotion will only use the first style found in a text object and ignore the rest. Style handling is a feature which we're hoping to support in a future version, that's all I can say at the moment.

Martin Baker
www.digital-heaven.co.uk

Alright, I guess there's a consensus, then ...

Since I need to do these in Motion rather than AE, I'm just going to have to create multiple templates, and/or do some manual finessing.

Thank you all very much for your time & your expertise!

Best,
Ron D.