Adobe After Effects

Text Expressions

Expressions are also helpful for text—especially numbers. Want to animate numbers counting up or down? The Numbers effect is laughably clunky. Let’s do more with text expressions.

Source Text Expressions

Adding an expression to a text layer’s Source Text is remarkably intuitive. On a text layer, option/Alt-click the Source Text stopwatch to edit the expression. Anything you type in there will be displayed in text. This will overwrite what’s currently in your text.

However, there’s one syntax caveat. After Effects will attempt to look for expressions in your text—unless you put it in quotation marks. Quotation marks are a means of sneaking plain English into an expression. This type of data is called a string.

This can be ...