Elements of Anarchy Manual 3

8/14/2019 Elements of Anarchy Manual 3

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Elements of Anarchy: Text®Plug-ins for Adobe After Effects and

compatible applications.

Designed by: Jim TierneyProgramming: Garrick Meeker

© 2001 Digital Anarchy, Inc.



Table of Contents

Introduction 4

Support Information 4

Section I: Common Parameters 5

Randomness 5

Random Characters 5

Text Dialog Box 6 Font Menu 6

Text Field and Select Text File 6

Whole Lines checkbox 6

Sequential Lines checkbox 6

Lock buttons 6

Lower and Upper Character Limits 7

Font Size and Font Size Randomness 7

Rate of Change and ROC Randomness 7

Time Offset 8

Randomness Seed 8

Section II: Text Matrix9

Intro To Text Matrix 9

Characters Section 10

Character Rotation and Character Spin 10

Text Color, Leading Character Color, and Color Blending 10

For other parameters, see Section I

Streams Section 11

Center of Streams 11

Number of Streams 11

Length of Streams 11

Speed 12

Time Between Streams 12Direction of Streams 12

Snap To Grid checkbox 13

Auto-Point Size/Spacing checkbox 13

New Streams Overtake Old Checkbox 13

No New Streams checkbox 13

Stream Spacing and Attributes Section 13

Space Between Streams, Space Between Characters 13

Fade In and Fade Out 14

Opacity 14

Path Controls 14

Text Path pop-up 14

Orient Character To Path 14

Path Start/End Point 14

Section III: Text Grid 15

Getting Into It 15

Character Section 16

Color, Random Color, and Frequency of Random Color 16

For other parameters, see Section I

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Section III cont.

Grid Setup 16

Grid Position 16

Rows and Columns 16

Space Between Rows/Columns 17

Moving Rows and Columns 17

Jitter 17

All parameters 17

Flow 18

Flow Speed 18

Flow Direction 18

Change During Flow 18

Preset Characters 18

Magnify 1 & 2 19

Magnify Position 19

Magnify Strength 19

Magnify Width and Height 19

Magnify Taper 19

Section IV: Screen Text 21

Characters Section 21

Font Size Randomness 21

All other parameters, see Section I

Main Setup 21

Starting Point 21

Length of Lines 21

Scroll Speed 21

Color, Random Color, and Frequency of Random Color 22Vertical Alignment and Lock To Grid checkboxes 22

Line Spacing And Setup Section 22

Space Between Lines 22

Space Between Characters 22

Frequency of Overwrite 23

Direction of Lines 23

Display Speed and DS Controls Scroll Speed 23

Preset Characters 24

Appendix A: ASCII Table 25

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Important Note! Read This! : When you apply any of the lters, if you don’t enter anything in the text dialog box, you

need to select the ‘Random Characters’ checkbox for anything to appear on the screen. With nothing in the textdialog box, you’re telling the lters not to render anything. With ‘Random Characters’ turned on, you tell the lters to justgenerate random text, instead of looking at the text dialog.

Introduction: Elements of Anarchy: Text

For quite some time now, ashing, streaming computer generated numbers and characters have been a well requestedeffect. Whether you’re trying to create text for a computer terminal on a movie set, generating a background element, or trying to show large amounts of information, random text effects are often time consuming. In many cases, you don’t evencare what they say, you just need some garbage text ickering away.

One goal of these lters is to address the need for these ‘elements’ and make them easy to create. These text effectsgenerally are not the focal point of the production or piece being worked on. However, they are necessary nonetheless, if only to provide a background texture for the truly important part of the project.

Elements of Anarchy: Text attempts to eliminate the time consuming portion of the creation process allowing you to quickly

create a text element and be done with it.

Support and Stuff

We hope that you nd Elements of Anarchy: Text to give you all the control you could want, while simple enough that youcan set everything up in a few minutes. It’s our desire to make sure you’re satised with your purchase, and if you haveany questions, comments, or whatever, we’d love to hear them.

If there’s anything you’d like to see added to any of the lters, a completely different effect that you’d like to see a plug-infor, or would just like to say hello… denitely send us an email at [email protected].

If you have any technical problems or questions related to the lters, please email [email protected].

Note to users of AE-Compatible applications (Final Cut Pro, Combustion, etc):

Due to the way some of these programs implement the AE API, some features may not work in those programs. For example, the path feature in Text Matrix will probably only work in After Effects. This is the only example that probably willnot work in anything but AE, but there may be other problems depending on the application. This is beyond our control, asit is up to the manufacturers of those programs to ensure that they are truly compatible with the AE API.

Most compatible applications don’t support the ‘sections’ in the plug-in interface. So you should just see a list of parameters, as opposed to a list of sections that contain the parameters, as you would see in After Effects.

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Section I : Common Parameters

These are parameters you will nd in all three lters in Elements of Anarchy: Text. It didn’seem to make much sense to write essentially the same thing in each section devoted tothe different lters, so we’re including them here.

Randomness

You’ll see many Randomness parameters. They usually look something like SBL Randomness or TBS Randomness. The ‘SBL’ or ‘TBS’ simply refer back to the parameter thatthe Randomness slider affects. For example, SBL is Space Between Lines, and TBS isTime Between Streams. This will usually be obvious, since the Randomness slider will bedirectly below the parameter it affects (see g. 1).

The Randomness sliders work in percentages. The higher the percentage, the wider therange of possible values. Since all three lters have particle systems at their heart, eachcharacter, line, and stream (called ‘objects’ from here on out), have their own set of uniqueattributes. If there’s no randomness, then each object has the same value for that attributebe it speed, font size, whatever.

If there is randomness then each object will get a random value from within the range

determined by the Randomness percentage. For example:

With Font Size, setting the randomness to 100% will cause each character to have a fonsize that is the original font size +/- the original font size. For example, if you have a fontsize of 20, and set the randomness to 100% you will get a font size between 3 points and40 points (there is a lower limit of 3 points in this case). 20 +/- 20 = 0 to 40, or 3 to 40 withthe lower limit.

Setting the randomness to something else will decrease the range of possible point sizesIf randomness is set to 50%, then the range would be 10 to 30… which is 20 +/- (20 * .5).

Hey, not only did you get an After Effects lter, but you get a FREE algebra lesson as wellWhat a deal! We’ll be offering Ginzu knifes in no time, I’m sure.

Randomness can be set much higher than 100% in most cases. This results in a muchhigher range of possible values, but it tends to be weighted in the upper values, becausethere’s usually a lower limit, but no upper limit. In the case of Font Size, the lower limit is 3so even if we set Randomness to 1000%, the lower limit will be 3. However, the upper limi(in the example above) is now 200 points, because 1000% = 10, so it becomes 20 (originafont size) * 10. Giving us a range of 3 to 200.

Random Characters

Has hopefully has been pointed out enough so far, if you don’t enter any text into the dialogbox, and don’t turn on Random Characters, nothing will appear on the screen.

Aside from making the lter appear to work, what does this do? I’m glad you askedRandom Characters lls your grid with characters that are randomly selected from therange that you dene with the Lower Character Limit and the Upper Character Limit.

This range is the ASCII representation of characters in your font.

What in the world is ASCII? It stands for American Standard Code for Information Inter-change. Yeah, I know… whatever… BUT, it’s the codes that computers use to tell onecharacter from another. Generally, in every font you run into, 65 will be a capital letter A102 will be a lower case letter F, 48 will be zero, and so on. There’s a couple ASCII chartsin the appendix if you’re looking for your favorite character.

A good example of what random-ness can do for you. Here we’veapplied it to the Font Size.

Here we’ve limited the character set to between 48 (zero) and 57(nine). The result is that we onlyget numbers, 0 through 9.

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However, things get interesting when you go above 127. There’s guidelines that most fontsfollow as for what’s in the slots between 0 and 127. Above 127 is mostly uncharted territoryand you’ll nd a wide range of characters and symbols up there, depending on the font.

If you have font that is made up of all symbols, clip art, or Chinese characters or somethingelse, then the lower 127 all y out the window as well. It really only applies to English texfonts.

If you’re on a Macintosh and are curious about what characters a given font has and where

they’re at, go to the Apple Menu and look for a program called Key Caps. Unfortunately, don’t know the Windows equivalent.

Text Dialog Options

Font Menu

The Options Box is where you will usually start off. It is here that you set the font you’regoing to use. Any TrueType or Postscript Type 1 font can be used.

If you want to have random characters generated, this is all you need to set in the OptionsBox. If you wish to use special characters of a font, be aware of the ASCII codes for thosecharacters. There are a few examples of fonts in the Appendix of this manual, with their

ASCII codes and corresponding symbols.

Text Field and Select Text File

If you wish the lters to spew out words or sentences of your own design, then the OptionsBox is critical. This is where you set up the text you want displayed. This can be accomplished in two ways. The rst is simply entering the text you want to come forth, into thetext box provided. The second is to use the le selector and select a text le that containsthe text you’ve already typed out.

You can also copy and paste the text from the le into the text eld, thus allowing you tosee all the text at once, instead of having to open a word processor to view/change it. Anamazing invention, that copy and paste stuff.

‘Whole Lines’ checkbox

There’s also two checkbox for controlling the way the text you’ve entered gets displayed onthe screen. By default, the lters will sequentially display whole lines. Lines are identiedby a ‘return’ at the end. The text between ‘returns’ will then be seen as a complete line. Igoes through the text eld or le and looks for lines, and then displays them.

If this is turned off, then words are displayed. With words, TM looks for spaces betweenthe words.

‘Sequential Lines’ checkbox

There’s also a checkbox for reading the text sequentially. This is on by default. What thismeans, is that the le is read from beginning to end, with no random jumping around. If thisis off, words or lines are picked at random to be displayed.

If ‘Whole Lines’ is checked as well, the result will be, in the case of Text Matrix, that the rsstream displayed gets the rst line, the second stream gets the second line of text, the thirdstreams gets the third line, etc., etc. Otherwise, words just get inserted into the streamssequentially, with no attention paid to where the lines begin and end.

The ‘Lock’ Buttons

Since all the lters use a particle system to some degree, each stream, line, or character

We’ve chosen a font that hasChinese characters. You can usealmost any Truetype or PostscriptType 1 font.

This is the Text Dialog Box for TextMatrix. TM has the most parame-ters, and so has the most ‘Lock’buttons. The dialog looks basicallythe same in the other lters.

The top example has both WholeLines and Sequential Lines turnedon. This results in the lter justplaying back the text you entered.

The bottom has both turned off.This gives us randomly selectedwords.

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can have it’s own set of attributes. The ‘Lock’ buttons determine if these attributes changeover time, or whether they’re ‘Locked’ in place when the stream, line, or character is created and rst displayed on the screen.

If ‘Lock’ is NOT selected (e.g. Lock Color), as you animate a parameter (say, Color), everything on the screen will change. Animating from red to green to blue, will cause all thecharacters on the screen to change from red to green to blue.

However, if ‘Lock’ IS selected, then whatever value the stream or line was created with, wil

stay with it. Only new streams/lines will be affected by the keyframed value. In the caseof Color, that means the streams created rst would be red, streams created a little laterwould be green, and streams created last would be blue.

Lower and Upper Character Limits

As mentioned, these dene the range of the characters (in decimal ASCII code) that theRandom Characters checkbox draws from. These have no effect if Random Characters isnot selected.

The really nice benet of this is that you can select exactly the range of characters youwant to use. This is particularly cool if you can design your own fonts. Use characters ocreate vector art and put them into the font. There are many ‘clip art’ fonts that are pictures

instead of characters. Opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Anyways, say you’re using the boring old Arial font. Setting Lower to 48 and Higher to57, would result in only numbers being produced in the streams. Setting Lower to 65 andHigher to 90, would result in only capital letters being shown. There are complete tables fora few fonts in the Appendix. Just to give you a sample of what most fonts look like in ASCIand some of the unusual things you can nd in the upper reaches.

Font Size and Font Size Randomness

Font Size is pretty self-explanatory. It’s simply how big the letters are. If you’re familiar withany word processor or graphics application that handles text, this should be old hat. Thelarger the point size, the bigger the character.

If you’ve never used a word processor and After Effects is the rst application you’re usingon a computer, that’s denitely ambitious!

It does affect the spacing of the streams however. The larger the font size, the more spaceis put in between streams, characters, or rows/columns

Font Size Randomness, like all the ‘Randomness’ sliders you’ll run into in this lter, controlsthe variation in the parameter it’s attached to. In this case, it varies the point size of eachcharacter.

Rate of Change and ROC Randomness

This is an extremely important property. It controls how often the characters change. Bydefault it’s set to change every frame (1.0). There are plenty of instances where you mighnot want the characters to be changing so rapidly however.

The value is in frames, so if you set it to 3.0, the characters will change every 3 frames.Set it to 30, and the characters will change every second (assuming a 30fps movie). Veryuseful if you don’t want characters changing so quickly that you’re viewers can’t make ouwhat they are. Particularly important if you’re using a ‘symbol’ or ‘clip art’ font.

Setting this to less than one has no real effect, as it’s impossible to change the charactersmore often than once a frame. Well, it’s possible, but you won’t see any difference between1 and .5 (or whatever), so not much point to it. Of course, if you really feel the need to

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get your money’s worth, and want to make that thar software work like it’s never workedbefore, well then, I say unto you: ‘you go, girl.’ (or boy or whatever)

The Randomness varies how frequently each character changes. The Rate of Change wilfall in a range around the value that the Rate of Change is set to +/- a percentage of theRate of Change value. See the chart in the appendix for more information on how thisworks.

Time Offset

Think of Time Offset as a way of moving the Time Marker to a point along the Timeline, andbeing able to set that point as 00:00:00.

Time Offset cycles through the animation and allows you to begin the animation at thatpoint. For example, say you like the way things look on Frame 90. Setting Phase to 90 wilcause Frame 0, to look like Frame 90 and the animation will continue from that point.

This is an easy way of getting around having to wait for the streams to be created and jumpstart the process.

This also provides an easy way of ‘time remapping’ the effect. Just start Time Offset a360 or something, and animate it backwards. You’ll have streams crawling up the screen

Although, if you have a bunch of other parameters animating as well, it may get a bit con-fusing. You’ll have everything animating forward in time, but Time Offset will be animatingbackwards, essentially.

Hah! A new feature! Text Matrix allows you to reverse time, while moving forward in timeA necessary feature for time travel. :P

One odd thing about Time Offset is what it does to keyframes. Keyframes still happen atthe time they’re set at, but if you use Time Offset, you shift the beginning of the timelineout. So that the beginning of the Timeline, isn’t really the beginning. If you set Time Offseto 90, 03:00 on the Timeline is your real starting point, not 00:00. So any keyframes thaare set before 03:00 won’t be seen.

Make sure you keep this in mind when using Time Offset and setting keyframes for TexMatrix.

Randomness Seed

This sets the seed that all the randomness values use. If you change this, any part of theanimation that uses randomness will be changed. However, it’ll be changed in a predict-able way. If RS is set to 50 and you change it 98, the animation will change. If you then seit back to 50, the animation will revert back to what it was.

This can be very useful for creating different animations with changing only one parameterDepending on how many other parameters are affected by randomness, you could have a

substantially different animation occur because of changing the seed.

An example of Time Offset. Noticethat the top screen shot is 90frames out at 03:00.

The bottom screen shot is at 00:00but Time Offset is set to 90frames.

The result of both these settingsis the image at the top. They pro-duce exactly the same result.

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Section II: Text Matrix

Intro to Text Matrix

Features

Before we jump into exactly what all the parameters do, we’ll get into an overview of the important parts of the lter. Thisway you’ll have a good idea of what the parameter sections are used for and where to look if you want to create a speciceffect, and don’t know what parameter to tweak to get it.

The Option Box

This is where you tell Text Matrix (TM ) what font to use and where you set up specic text to be used. You can either typein the text you want TM to sample from or specify a .txt le (simple text on the Mac or Windows notepad le) that TM wiluse. In either case, you can read words randomly or you can tell TM to read words or lines sequentially… one at a time righdown the page (so to speak :) ).

Choosing a font is certainly critical to what type of characters will be generated. Obviously, if you choose a font with Japanese characters, you’ll get Japanese characters.

Characters

If you choose not to enter any text manually, you can have TM just generate random text. There are several controls fordetermining which characters will be generated and what their attributes will be (such as color, rotation, how fast theychange, etc). Of course, this will be partially determined by what font you choose in the Options Box.

You can also specify which characters will be displayed, by adjusting the Alternative character settings.

Streams

Streams are simply the streams of characters, which have their own attributes, such as opacity, length, horizontal or verticalspeed, etc. Streams allow you to group characters together creating all sorts of interesting effects, from the Matrix effect toSlot Machine Wheels. There are also a number of parameters here controlling the positioning of the streams.

Stream Spacing

This section controls the ‘look’ of the streams. The spacing between characters, and between the streams themselveswhether they fade in or out, and the opacity. The spacing between characters acts either similar to what leading or trackingwould be in print, but it varies depending the orientation of the streams.

Path Controls

One of the most exciting things about TM is the ability for streams to follow paths. Simply create a mask on the layer you’veapplied TM to, assign that path to the streams using the Text Path parameter, and you’ve got streams of text ying all ovethe screen!

The combinations of character, stream, and path attributes opens up a world of possibilities and different effects. Most

parameters can be ‘randomized’, thus causing random variations in the font size, speed, stream length, and virtually everything else.

Onto those pesky parameters and guring out what the hell they do. ;-)

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The Text Dialog – See Section I

Characters

Random Characters: See section I

Font Size and Font Size Randomness: See Section I

Rate of Change and ROC Randomness: See Section I

Character Rotation, Rotation Randomness, and Character Spin

This is the orientation of the characters. Unless this is animated it results in no movementThe characters will all be rotated by whatever the value is. If it’s set to 45, then each char-acter will be rotated by 45 degrees

Use Character Rotation to precisely control the spin of characters. If you just want to rotatethe character by 180 degrees, it’s much easier to do it with this than Character Spin. Jusset a keyframe for zero at one point in time, and a keyframe for 180 at some other point.

As elsewhere, the randomness varies the amount of rotation among the different charac-ters. See Section I for more information on how Randomness works.

Character Spin works a bit differently. The value of Character Spin is the amount that eachcharacter gets rotated each frame. You don’t need to set any keyframes, just set a valuesay 3, and hit render. In this case, each character would rotate 3 degrees each frame.

Taking the Rotation example of 180 degress, you could certainly do that with CharacterSpin. Just divide 180 degrees by the number of frames you want it to occur over. If wewanted it to occur over 60 frames, easy! 180/60 = 3. Just set a hold keyframe at 3, and 60frames later, set another keyframe for zero.

However, what if we want to have it occur over 70 frames? Just set it to: 180/70 =2.5714285714285714285714285714286. Ack! Er… just use Character Rotation. Mucheasier, unless you just like doing lots of math, in which case, please be my guest and use

Character Spin. :)

Text Color, Leading Character Color, and Color Blending

Nothing complex here. Text Color is the color of the characters.

Leading Character Color is a bit more interesting, but equally simple. It allows you tospecify a different color for the rst character in a stream. The goal here is to make thestreams a bit more interesting and to mix up the colors a bit.

This can also be used with Color Blending to gradually fade the leading color into thenormal Text Color, all the way up the stream. Be default, it’s set to 0, which is what causes

only the rst character to be affected.

Of course you can use other lters or other layers to inuence the text colors, but thisallows you to add some variety within the lter.

Use Alternative Characters checkbox

Lower Alt Character

Higher Alt Character

See Upper and Lower Character Limits in Section I.

The streams on the left have nospin setting but have the rotationset to 90 degrees.

The streams on the right, have norotation, but have a spin setting of 4 degrees. Notice that each char-acter is rotating seperately.

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Streams Section

Center of Streams and Center Randomness

This is a bit of a misnomer. It should be called the Origination Point or something. It denesthe upper, left starting point of the streams. As you add more streams they extend to theright edge of the screen from this point.

Center Randomness behaves as normal, and varies the origination point of each stream.

Number of Streams

This is one of those parameters that it’s tough to do anything but state the obvious. So…This allows you to set the number of streams that make up the matrix of text.

The streams, by default, fall vertically and are spaced out horizontally. So if you set Numbeof Streams to 10, you’ll have 10 slots spaced out (courtesy of the Space Between Characters parameter… it’ll be explained later) across the screen that streams can fall in.

Imagine having a piece of metal with 10 grooves cut into it. Water can only go into thegrooves. The streams of water may not be constant, so you may have two small streams indifferent parts of the groove. However, the streams can ONLY be in the grooves, so if you

count up the streams, including the cases where there are two streams in one groove, youcould possibly have more than 10. However, you will never have more than 10 grooves fothem to fall through. This is basically how Number of Streams work.

To be honest, there are ways to get the streams to break out of their grooves, but we’lldiscuss that a bit later. For the moment, the streams are nicely behaved, gettin’ their grooveon, and staying in it.

Hmm… well, I guess I did go a bit beyond stating the obvious. Who knew?

Length of Stream and Length of Stream Randomness

Alrighty, now we’re getting into the heart of things.

Length of Stream (LoS) denes the number of characters that the stream will have in it.The higher the value the longer the stream.

The characters get revealed over time. New characters appear as old ones move out of theway. So, the higher the Speed setting the faster the stream will reach its maximum lengthOf course, it’ll move off the screen faster as well.

LoS plays a large part in how the nal animation looks. Very long streams will end up jusbeing columns of characters on the screen. If you want this effect, great, if not, then keepthe value relatively low. This will give you lots of variation, particularly if Time BetweenStreams is set to a low value.

Having values so high that you have columns of text works in the opposite direction as wellTry setting a value of 1. This will give you streams of 1 character, which I guess isn’t reallya stream. You’ll simply end up with lots of single characters falling from the sky. Howeveit’s a pretty neat effect.

If you want to adjust the starting position of your streams, check out the Phase parameterdescribed later.

Characters in streams will usually move smoothly down the screen. This makes everythingfeel very random, a bit like owing water. If you don’t want this kind of smooth randomnesscheck out the Snap To Grid checkbox. This will force all characters into appearing in apredened ‘matrix’. Much like a digital clock screen or old computer terminal.

Notice that the top streams arelined up with the bottom streams.Usually, streams are stuck in agroove. They can catch up tostreams that came before them,but they don’t usually shift to a dif-ferent slot.

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Randomness, like usual, varies the LoS of each stream on a stream by stream basisCheck Section I for more info on Randomness. This is actually fairly important, as this incombination with Speed Randomness, and Time Between Streams Randomness will giveyou variety in the look and positioning of the streams.

Speed and Speed Randomness

Speed, obviously, controls how fast the streams move.

If you set this to zero, the streams don’t budge. Actually, if this is set to zero, you get abunch of one character streams. The streams usually require that one character move outof the way before another character is displayed. If the initial character doesn’t move, thesecond character has no place to go. So the second character just sits at home waitingfor the casting call. Once the initial character gets a movin’ and makes some room on thestage, the second character makes an appearance.

Whatever you set Speed to, is how many pixels the streams, and/or characters in thestream, will move per frame. This is where Speed Randomness comes in. With speedrandomness set to zero, the streams all just move down the screen in one big block o’ textWhich you may want. Or you may not.

Speed is probably the most essential parameter. You have to have something set here, o

else, it’s a pretty unexciting plug-in.

Time Between Streams

This determines how long (in frames) TM waits before producing a new stream, once anold stream has reached it’s maximum length. If this is set to 30, then 30 frames after astream has reached it’s max length, a new stream will be produced, regardless of whethethe old stream has disappeared off the screen. This is what determines if you can havemore than one stream in a given ‘groove’.

You may want text raining down on the screen like, well, like rain. Rain is pretty random, soin this case you’d want to crank randomness up to 100%. Now you’ve got streams beginning and ending all over the place. Again, using this with Length Randomness creates the

variation needed to really make the streams seem random.

As always, see Section I for more info about the way Randomness behaves.

Direction of Streams and Direction Randomness

This controls the direction of the streams. You can have them going at an angle, goinghorizontal (set it to 90 degrees), going up, whatever.

As you rotate the streams, they’ll rotate around the Center of Streams point as if it were theupper left corner (which it is). This produces a hard edge where the streams get created.To remove this simply drag the Center point of the edge of the layer, until the edge isn’visible any more.

Direction Randomness has one quirk. Each stream is rotated randomly, however, it’srotated around it’s starting point. So instead of having all the streams go out from a centraposition, the go out randomly from what appears to be a line, basically the edge that occurswhen you rotate them.

You can solve this problem (assuming you consider it a problem) a couple ways.

One: set the number of streams really low, say 4, so they’re all at about the same origination point, and set Time Between Streams really low, like 10, so you have a LOT of streamsbeing created.

In the top example, the SpaceBetween Streams is normal, andthe streams look like they are scat-

tered along an edge.

In the bottom, the streams havebeen pushed together with a neg-ative Space Between Streamssetting and all have the same orig-ination point.

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Two (and probably the better way): Set Space Between Streams to a negative value, sothat all the streams are on top of each other. This gives them all the same origination poinand when you move the Direction Randomness slider from 0 to 100, all the streams spreadout like a ower.

Snap To Grid Checkbox

Snap to Grid, as mentioned earlier, causes the characters to lock to a matrix, which isdened by the SBS and SBC parameters. This creates a more ‘digital’ or computerized

look. Instead of smoothly moving down the screen, the characters jump from preset position, to preset position, all the way down.

Auto-Point Size/Spacing Checkbox

This checkbox takes the Number of Streams and automatically adjusts the point size of thecharacters and the Space Between Characters, to ll the screen up with characters. Thereis an upper limit on the point size of the characters, so if you have too few streams, it won’ll the screen up. This is basically a quick and dirty way of lling the screen up.

New Streams Overtake Old Checkbox

Normally, the speed of streams will be such, that even when randomized, no streams in

the same ‘slot’ (or groove or whatever) will catch up to one that’s in front of it. The rst onewill always get off the screen before the second one catches up to it.

This checkbox overrides that. With this checked, streams can overtake older streams andoverlap on top of them.

No New Streams

This prevents any new streams from being created after the rst set of them are dis-played.

Stream Spacing and Attributes Section

Space Between Streams, Space Between Characters, and Randomness

These two parameters control the spacing of the characters.

Space Between Streams (SBS) moves the streams closer or further away from each otherThis works regardless of the orientation of the streams, or if they’re on paths or not. Usethis to spread the streams across the screen or pull them on top of each other.

Space Between Characters (SBC) does the same except for characters. Essentially thesame as tracking or leading, depending on the way the streams are oriented.

The two parameters also control how the matrix is set up, when you select Snap To GridIf you want the characters to be closer or further together, adjust these two to get the righcharacter ‘spots’.

The Randomness parameters here behave the same as other Randomness parameters(see the appendix), except they have a more dramatic effect on the animation. This is whalets the streams break out of the ‘grooves’ we talked about earlier. By default, SBS controlswhere the grooves are. By setting the SBS Randomness to something above zero, eachstream will be close to the groove, but doesn’t need to be exactly in it.

This is very useful for increasing the complexity of your animation and making things lookless ‘preset’. Streams can overlap, some will be close, some far, it’ll give you a muchgreater sense of natural motion. Exactly the opposite of Snap To Grid.

The results of Snap To Grid.

The top image has streams scat-tered about.

The bottom image has all the char-acters locked into grid positions.

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These can also be set to negative values, allowing you to get the streams or characters tobunch up together. This is very useful in the case of Direction Randomness.

Fade In and Fade Out

These cause the streams to taper off in opacity as they are coming or going. It’s actuallymore correct to say that it causes the characters opacity to taper on/off. The Fade In valueis how long it takes a character to become fully opaque from the time it appears on thescreen.

Likewise, the Fade Out value is the number of frames before a character will start fadingout. Since there isn’t a denite ‘lifespan’, this is calculated from when the character wascreated. So if it appeared on screen on frame 10, and the Fade Out value is 90, then onframe 100, it would start to fade out

Opacity

Opacity simply determines the overall opacity of the streams. Nothing complicated here. A100%, the streams is fully opaque, at 0% the streams are fully transparent, and you can’see them.

Time Offset: see section I

Randomness Seed: see section I

Path Controls

One of the great things about TM is that you can use a path to control it. Create a maskon the layer that TM is applied to and that mask can be used to guide the streams. Make amask of a star or wave and the streams will happily follow around the outline.

TM also supports animated paths, so you could animate the wave and the streams wilfollow it along, undulating with the wave motion.

One of the downsides to this is that it does slow the lter down, especially for long anima-

tions. Time Offset also affects this. The further in the animation, the more streams arebeing kept track of, and the slower the particle system gets. Having to keep track of thestreams on the vector path gets a bit processor intensive. Just something to be aware ofas you’re using it.

Text Path

This pop-up simply allows you to select which path you want to use. Since it recognizesany path, you can create a variety of paths and try them out with a given animation, or usethe same animation to follow different shapes.

Orient Character to Path

This adjusts the rotation of characters to the angle of the path, keeping each characteperpendicular to the path.

Path Start/End Point

This moves the starting point of the path. Usually, streams will start at the top, and workthere way around a path. This parameter allows you to shift the starting point.

NOTE TO USERS OF AE ‘COMPATIBLE’ APPLICATIONS: Paths don’t work in anythingbut AE. Most of AE-compatible applications don’t support that part of the AE API. So it’sbeyond our control.

The top image is just your stan-dard path. Turn on the mask from

the pop-up and this is what you’llget.

The bottom image has the Startpoint moved 90 degrees, and hasthe Orient Characters checkboxselected.

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Section III: Text Grid

Text grid is a lter designed to ll a background with characters or symbols. These characters can remain static or changerandomly and are spread over a grid. The characters can ow across the grid and you have complete control over thecharacteristics and the way they behave (direction, speed, etc.). You can dene the number of rows and columns, the spac-

ing, and introduce randomness into the grid, so it’s not so gridlike. Grids are really great, but there are times when you wanyour grid to ‘think different’ and adding a bit of chaos, will do that.

Getting Into It

Before we get into the parameters themselves, lets explain the parameter sections a little.

The Options Box makes a return appearance from Text Matrix. Again, this is where you’ll set the font, and set up anycustom text and how it appears.

You’ll see later that you can set the rows and columns in the ‘grid’ that the text is displayed in. If you manually enter in text (ouse a text le via the ‘Load’ button), Text Grid will ignore the columns setting and create however many columns is neededto display your text. Rows are acknowledged and the number of rows set, will be the number of rows on the screen.

Otherwise, this should look familiar from Text Matrix.

The ‘Whole Lines’ checkbox causes entire lines to be displayed. If this is off, then random words are picked from the all thetext entered, and displayed by themselves.

The ‘Sequential Lines’ checkbox causes all the lines in the dialog to be presented right after each other, just as you typedthem in. If this is off, different lines will be mixed all over the place. This wouldn’t be useful if you wanted to present aparagraph of text, but it does have some nice things about it.

Character Attributes is where you’re going to set up how the individual characters look and behave. There are otherparameters in other sections that affect what individual characters do, but this section let’s you set up their basic behavior.

Grid Setup allows you to determine what the grid is going to look like. How many rows or columns, positioning, etc. This isgoing to form the basis of whatever effect you try and achieve, so this is a good place to start when you’re setting everythingup.

Jitter moves the individual characters around from their normal spots on the grid. This creates jumping, dynamic text. Becareful about using this, as it can make your words unreadable. However, it can impart a sense of energy or stress ontoyour letters.

Flow pushes the characters in the grid, and moves them in a direction. The text ‘ows’ across the grid, creating variouspatterns, or revealing other words. If you wanted to set up a stock ticker, for example, this would be very useful.

Preset Characters simply allows you to have the lter randomly generate certain sets of characters, such as Capitals,

Binary Numbers, etc.

The Magnify Sections distort the text that underlies them. These sections are quite possibly the most powerful parts of thelter. They allow you to create all sorts of different distortion effects, especially when used together. The two sections are

denitely worth exploring.

15



Exploring Text Grid

The Text Dialog Box - See Section I

Random Characters - See Section I

Lower and Upper Character Limits - See Section I

Character Attributes Section

Font Size and Randomness: See section I

Rate of Change of Characters and Randomness: See section I

Color, Random Color, and Frequency of Color

Color normally denes the color of the characters. Pretty straightforward.

Random Color and Frequency get a little more interesting. By setting Frequency to something other than zero, Text Grid will start randomly giving characters the color denedby Random Color. The higher the Frequency amount, the more characters will have theRandom Color. If Frequency is set to 100%, the entire grid will be the Random Color.

If the Random Color is exactly the same as the normal Color, the Frequency slider won’tappear to have any affect, as it’s replacing one color with the exact same color.

One interesting thing to do with this is to set the Random Color to the color of your back-ground. If you have a black background, set it to black. This will make the characters withthe Random Color invisible… well, not really, but you can’t see black characters on a blackbackground. If something passes behind the black characters that isn’t black, then, yes,you’ll see the black characters.

Grid Setup Section

Grid Position

This sets the upper, left hand corner of the grid. All rows and columns go out from here.If you animate the Space Between Columns, or the number of Rows, they will all animatefrom this point.

It’s similar to an anchor point in After Effects.

The Grid Position can be animated, and can be positioned off the layer. This can allow youto pull off some nice effects using the boring old position point. For example, you couldanimate the GP down, while lowering the number of rows, and make it appear as if rowsare being subtracted from the top and bottom of the Grid.

Rows and Columns

They simply dene the number of Rows and Columns in the Grid. Characters are then lledinto the various slots.

However simple, virtually every other parameter is affected by the way the Grid is set upand these are the two primary controls for doing that. The look of your animation is goingto rely heavily on how many Rows and Columns you have and the spacing between them

A really nice example of using theMagnify points.

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Space Between Rows/Columns, and Randomness

These parameters allow you to set up the spacing between your rows and columns. Thesewould be kind of similar to setting the Leading and Kerning in a normal text program. Thething to keep in mind however, is that since this IS a grid, all the characters ‘slots’ areequal distance from one another. This creates a few problems with fonts that aren’t mono

spaced.

Many fonts are designed to vary the space between characters, depending on what thecharacter is. Look at the ‘i’ and the ‘g’ above. Due to the way the normal font is set up, thereappears to be more space between the two characters than between other charactersHowever, if you look at the mono-spaced font, this is clearly not so, and it’s an issue withthe font.

There’s no real solution for this problem in Text Grid, other than to use a font where thespacing isn’t such an issue. It’s denitely something to be aware of, though.

The Randomness slider varies the space between the individual Rows and Columns bysome random amount. This creates a much less rigid grid. It will still be obvious that there

is a grid, but it eliminates the ‘pattern’ of the grid (e.g. 5 spaces, then a column, 5 spacesthen a column, etc).

Moving Rows and Columns

This only matters when Flow Speed is set to something other than zero. Usually, Flow wilcause the characters to move across the grid, from column to column, row to row, but thegrid will stay stationary. For example, like a stock ticker, where the characters move acrossthe screen, and are replaced by other characters as they move.

If Moving Rows and Columns is selected, the characters will stay in their positions in thegrid, and the entire grid itself will move, in one big block of text. New characters will notbe added as the rows and columns move, nor will new rows or columns be created as the

existing ones move.

Jitter Section

We’re not really going to discuss the individual parameters as much as the overall effechere.

Jitter moves the characters in the grid around randomly. The characters stay more or lessconned to their place in the grid but shift a given amount every so often.

The amount that they shift by is controlled by the Row Jitter and Column Jitter parametersThe higher these numbers the farther away from the original position the characters wilmove. You can set this to some really high amounts, however, especially for video, werecommend against it. You can create some nasty ickering effects if this is set too high.

That said, at more moderate amounts, it can create some really nice effects. The JitterFrequency and JF Randomness, help prevent the ickering at these amounts. Jitter Frequency controls how often the characters change positions. If this is set to 4, then eachcharacter will change positions every 4 frames. This helps remove any icker, and if youwant the characters readable, this makes the text more legible for viewers.

JF Randomness helps vary this change rate, and prevent EVERY character from changingevery four frames. Set at 25%, some characters will change every 3 frames, some 4, andsome 5. Obviously the higher you set this, the wider the range.

An example of mono-spaced fonts(bottom) vs. regular fonts. Notice

the spacing irregularities in the topimage (the regular font).

A normal grid (Top) and a gridthat’s been heavily ‘jittered’.

17



Flow Section

The Flow controls allow the characters to move across the grid. This can be useful in cre-ating stock tickers, scoreboards, or other similar types of displays. Characters will moveacross the grid from row to row, or column to column. As characters move from one columnto the other, they are either replaced by the character from the column next to it, or, if thereis no column next to it, by a completely new character. If the text has been dened in the

text dialog box, this new character will be pulled from the text entered there, otherwise it’lbe just another random character.

Flow Speed

This controls how fast the characters move across the screen. It’s actually relative to thefont size (the font size controls the spacing of the grid). The bigger the font size, the slowea given Flow Speed will move the characters. Actually this is really in pixels, but since abigger font size, means more pixels to cross before you get to the next column or row, thefont size has a big effect on this.

Remember, it’s a grid, and characters can only jump from one position to the next. It can’smoothly travel from one to the other. So the characters have to sit still until they would

have traveled to the next grid space. For example, if a character is moving 1 pixel perframe, and the next column is 16 pixels over, it has to wait 16 frames before jumping overYou can’t have it moving before then, because it would be all the way in the column, andthat defeats the purpose of having rows and columns in the rst place.

Flow Direction

This is the direction that the characters will ow in. It can be set to go in any directionAgain, because characters can only move from position to position in the grid, diagonamotion looks particularly jumpy. This works best if set to 45 degree angles.

Adjusting the Space Between Rows/Columns Randomness or the Jitter amounts can affechow this behaves and looks. The less like a grid the characters appear to be arranged inthe smoother the ow in any given direction, including diagonals.

Change During Flow

By default, when Flow Speed is set to something other than zero, the characters won’change. This is because, as the characters are moving, if they start changing, it becomesimpossible to detect a pattern, and it just looks as if each character is changing randomly

If you’d like Flow to pay attention to the Rate of Change parameters, just select ChangeDuring Flow. Usually, if Rate of Change is set to 5 or higher, a pattern is detectable andwon’t adversely affect the results of the characters moving. It helps if ROC Randomness isused to prevent every character from changing at the same time.

Preset Characters Section

Most of these should be self-explanatory. By selecting the checkboxes you limit the typesof characters that Text Grid will display. Capitals Only, displays only capital letters, Num-bers Only, displays only numbers, and so on.

Hexadecimal Only refers to the Hexadecimal numbering system, which has 16 digits (0-F)instead of the 10 (0-9) that we’re used to. When this is selected, 0-9 and A-F will be dis-played.

Full Byte doubles the size of each column, enabling to create the look of computer codewhich is displayed in Bytes and generally looks something like this:

An example of the Hexadecimaland Full Byte preset.

This also uses another trick, whichhas the Random Color set to theBackground color (Black)... makingsome characters appear invisible.

18



FF 0A 45 9C D38A 8B 5E 00 20 etc., etc…

Magnify 1 & 2

The rst, and most important, thing to know about the Magnify controls, is that you need toset Width and Height to something OTHER than 0.0. This is what they default to, so youcan play with all the other controls until your face turns blue and not have anything happenMake sure both Width and Height have positive values.

Let’s explain the parameters briey, then we’ll discuss how they work together.

Magnify Position

Species the center of the effect.

Position this over the character or characters that you want magnied.

Magnify Strength

Sets how much Magnify will enlarge the characters. This can be set quite high, so experi-ment with it. It’ll go up to 1000%, which results in characters being about 10 times theoriginal size.

Magnify Width and Height

Determines the number of columns and rows in each direction that will be affected by theeffect. This goes in both directions, so a setting of 2.0 will actually result in 4 columns/rowsbeing affected. 2 in one direction, 2 in the other.

Magnify Taper

This tapers the effect off. If it’s below 100, the characters will fall off and get smaller, as theyget further away from the center. If it’s above 100, the characters will get larger.

If you want the characters to fall off from the center and blend in with the outlying charac

ters, set Taper to 50%.

The Magnify controls were designed to create a ‘Magnication Glass’ effect (surprise, surprise ;-) ). As characters owed under the center point, they would get larger, and as theymoved away, would get smaller again. With the Taper set up correctly, this can be a seam-less effect with characters going from normal size, to big, back to normal size.

However, this turned out to be one of the more interesting set of controls in the entire setof plug-ins. Particularly if you mix the two magnify points together.

You can create textures of shrinking and growing characters by using these together. TheTaper control can cause the characters to almost disappear. If you set it to zero, looking athe edges, they are almost reduced to nothing.

Using the second magnify point, you can cause some of these characters to grow back, orfurther distort the distortion created by the rst magnify point.

Obviously, these can be animated around and used to make all sorts of undulating, owingand just generally organic motions among the characters.

The Magnication Glass effect, which is the basis of this effect, has some interesting offshoots. If you’re only using one line of text, you can use the magnify effect to run across theline of text, enlarging each character. With Taper set up correctly, this creates characters

jumping up in size and calming back down to their normal size. Just animate the positionpoint along the line of text, and that’s it. Getting text to behave this way is something that’s

A couple examples on how to useMagnify and the Taper controls.

The top image is a normal taper,set to zero.

The bottom image has MagnifyStrength set really low (like 20),and Taper set really high... like 400.This creates an inverted taper.

19



fairly difcult to pull off in After Effects otherwise.

You can link the position points to tracking data or other parameters (using Expressions oMotion Math), and have the points move, or the width expand based on what other layersare doing. Particularly with the addition of Expressions in AE 5, this can become a very cooand relatively easy effect to do.

One interesting aspect of the Strength parameter, is that if you set it to zero, the rowscolumns affected, will disappear. You can use this to remove rows in the middle of the grid

or use both magnify points to slowly remove lines from the top and bottom or sides.

Denitely explore this on your own and check out the web site for some cool tutorials onit.

20



Section IV: Screen Text

Random Characters – See section 1

Lower/Upper Character Limit – See section 1

Font Size – See section 1

Font Size Randomness

Normally, I’d just point you to Section 1, where this is described. In the case of Screen Textwhile this operates just like it does elsewhere, it produces a pretty nice effect when crankedup. It varies the Font Size, which creates a nice pattern among the lines. This pattern addsto the effect of randomly generated lines

Rate of Change of Characters and Randomness – See section 1

Main Setup

Starting Point

This is the origination point of the text. The text scrolls up (or in whatever direction theDirection of Lines parameter is set to) from here.

Length of Lines and Randomness

Controls how long the lines are. Randomness plays a key role here in allowing Screen Texto generate realistic looking displays. Normally, you would have lines of varying lengths,and this is exactly what Length of Lines Randomness creates. With it set to zero, you jusget one big block of characters scrolling up the screen. With Randomness set to a positiveamount, the lines are created with different lengths

One thing to remember here is that fonts with normal spacing will cause the lines to vary inlength slightly anyways. This is due to the fact that most fonts have certain letters that arecloser together than other ones.

If you use a mono-spaced font, where all the spacing between letters is exactly the sameall lines with the same number of characters will be exactly the same length.

You can see this effect by comparing a font like Times New Roman, to something likeMonaco or OCR A (which comes with many computer systems is a great font for theselters, and one that I use a lot in demos).

Scroll Speed

This controls how fast the lines scroll in the direction set. By default, lines scroll upwardsHowever, you can use the Direction dial to have them move in any direction.

The speed is in pixels per frame. The higher the value, the faster the lines of text will movein the given direction.

This speed setting can be ignored if Display Speed is set to something other than zeroand the DS (Display Speed) Controls Scroll Speed checkbox is selected. Display Speedcauses the lines to be typed on, appearing one (or more) character at a time, instead ofappearing all at once.

If the speed is set to zero, by default, one line is created and it does nothing but sit thereThis is because each line of text has to move out of the way before a new line of text can

Length of Lines with a good doseof Randomness applied.

Another example of the differencebetween fonts with regular spac-ing and mono-spaced fonts.

21



be created. If the speed is set to zero, then the rst line created never moves out of theway.

Frequency of Overwrite controls what happens in this situation. FO sets the speed that theone line is replaced, with another random or manually entered line of text.

Color, Random Color, and Frequency of Random Color

Color, as you might have guessed, denes the color of the text.

Random Color and Frequency of Random Color, allow you to set an alternative color, andthe frequency that it appears. The color is then randomly applied to lines that are producedas the text scrolls upwards. The higher the frequency, the more lines will appear with thealternative color. If you set Freq. of RC to 100%, then all lines will be the color specied inRandom Color.

Vertical Alignment and Lock To Grid

Vertical Alignment and Lock To Grid allow you to constrain the characters to Screen Text’sunderlying grid. With both of these selected you end up with an effect very similar to GridText.

Vertical Alignment constrains the characters to columns, spacing the letters out evenlyThis sort of forces the characters to be mono-spaced, however, due to varying characterwidths the result can be a little odd. You can adjust this spacing by changing the SpaceBetween Characters parameter in the Line Spacing section.

Lock To Grid constrains the lines to set rows. Instead of the normal smooth motion you seewhen the lines are scrolling, LTG causes the lines to jump between rows.

As usual, the scroll speed determines how fast lines of text move between rows. At a givenscroll speed, a line of text will take just as long to reach the top of the screen (assuming istarted from the bottom) with LTG on, as it would with it off. In fact, it’ll take just as long tomove between rows. A line won’t move up a row, until it would have gotten there normallyMeaning that if rows are 20 pixels apart, and lines usually move at 2 pixels per frame, i

takes 10 frames to get to the next row, regardless of whether LTG is on or not. The onlydifference being, with LTG off, the lines smoothly move between rows.

Line Spacing And Setup Section

Space Between Lines and SBL Randomness

This controls how much space appears between lines of text. The amount is in pixels. Thisacts similar to leading in a normal word processor. A new line of text won’t appear at theStarting Point, until the last line created has moved far enough away to make sure thathere is enough space between the two lines.

If Lock To Grid is turned on, this denes the space between rows. The rst row appearswhere the Starting Point of the text is at, and all subsequent rows are spaced out accordingto this parameter.

SBL can be set to have negative values. So if you don’t want new lines to wait for old linesto get out of the way, just set a negative value here. Of course, the lines will bunch up andmay not be readable, but if that’s the effect you’re looking for, then you’re set.

Space Between Characters and SBC Randomness

Denes the space between characters in a line of text. This is similar to tracking in a normaword processor. This only works on the whole line, there is no way of adjusting the spacebetween individual characters.

22



If Vertical Alignment is turned on then this denes the space between columns.Frequency of Overwrite

This ONLY works if Scroll Speed is set to zero. If Scroll Speed is set to zero, only oneline of text is produced. Frequency of Overwrite determines how often this one line of texchanges.

You can either have it generate random lines, or, like usual, it can pull the lines of text from

the text dialog box. This can be helpful in situations where you want several lines of text todisplay one at a time and don’t want to have to set up transitions.

Direction of Lines

This, oddly enough, controls the direction that the lines go off in. It allows you to have textscrolling down, at a 45 degree angle, or going horizontal.

Be aware of where your Starting Point is. If it’s at the bottom of the screen and the Directiondial is pointing down you’re not going to see very much. All the lines of text will be goingright off the bottom of the screen into oblivion.

The other thing to remember is that new lines don’t get created until old lines have moved

out of the way. If you have lines going horizontal, it may be awhile, depending on the lengthof the lines, before a second line is created. Likewise, if lines are going at an angle, therewill be less of them than if they were going straight up or straight down. It takes longer folines moving at an angle to get out of the way. The distance they have to move for a newline to be created is determined by Space Between Lines.

Display Speed and DS Controls Scroll Speed

This allows the lines of text to be ‘typed’ on. The value here refers to characters per frameSo a setting of 1.0 is going to be the usual value. Higher values result in blocks of textappearing at the same time, which can cause the effect to not look very realistic. Althoughit depends on what you’re going for, the blocks can make for a more ‘old-school’ computelook.

You can also have values between 0 and 1.0. This will cause characters to be addedslower than every frame. For example, .5 would cause a character to be added every otheframe. .01 will result in a character being added every hundred frames. Just divide 1 bythe value to get the number of frames that characters will be added ( 1/.01 = 100, 1/.5 =2, etc.)

By default, all lines are typed on simultaneously. Since new lines simply need to wait foold lines to get out of the way before appearing, you end up with several lines typing them-selves on as they scroll up the screen. This can be an interesting effect, but not generallywhat you want.

DS Controls Scroll Speed prevents this from happening. With this selected, it’s a bit liketurning on Lock To Grid. Lines wait until they are completely typed on, then jump up to thenext row, making room for a new line to type itself on.

If you want to add a bit more realism to the text, if you’re trying to emulate a computerscreen, try to vary the speed a bit. Most people when typing, don’t type lines at a consistenspeed, even computers vary how fast they output results. Often, typing happens in burstsof speed. Try wiggling the display speed between .3 and 1 using hold keyframes.

Time Offset – See Section I

Randomness Seed – See Section I

Lines moving at an angle.

The Font Size has been random-ized, and the Random Color set toa yellowish color.

An example of normal DisplaySpeed (top), and what happenswith DS Controls Scroll Speedturned on.

Notice only the bottom line, in thebottom image, is being typed on.

23



Preset Characters

Characters Only: Just upper and lower case characters.

Capitals Only: Just upper case characters

Numbers Only: Just Numbers from 0 to 9.

Binary Only: Just 0 and 1s.

24



Appendix A: ASCII Codes

The characters between 0 and 31 are not going to be of much concern, since they don’t usu-

ally print or they’re undened. These are special codes that tell the computer or display to do

something, such as a Line Feed (LF) or End of Transmission (EOT). The interesting areas to

notice are 48 - 57 (numbers), 65 - 90 (Upper Case), and 97 - 122 (Lower Case). The ASCII values

are in decimal, which is what the lters use to set the character ranges.

The values above 127 exist, but vary for each font. Usually special symbols exist in the range

from 128 - 255, such as the trademark symbol, foreign currency symbols, or pi.

0 NUL 40 ( 80 P 120 x1 SOH 41 ) 81 Q 121 y2 STX 42 * 82 R 122 z3 ETX 43 + 83 S 123 {4 EOT 44 , 84 T 124 |5 ENQ 45 - 85 U 125 }6 ACK 46 . 86 V 126 ~7 BEL 47 / 87 W 127 DEL8 BS 48 0 88 X

9 HT 49 1 89 Y10 LF 50 2 90 Z11 VT 51 3 91 [12 FF 52 4 92 \13 CR 53 5 93 ]14 SO 54 6 94 ^15 SI 55 7 95 _ 16 DLE 56 8 96 `17 DC1 57 9 97 a18 DC2 58 : 98 b19 DC3 59 ; 99 c20 DC4 60 < 100 d21 NAK 61 = 101 e22 SYN 62 > 102 f 23 ETB 63 ? 103 g24 CAN 64 @ 104 h25 EM 65 A 105 I26 SUB 66 B 106 j27 ESC 67 C 107 k28 FS 68 D 108 l29 GS 69 E 109 m30 RS 70 F 110 n31 US 71 G 111 o32 Space 72 H 112 p33 ! 73 I 113 q

34 “ 74 J 114 r 35 # 75 K 115 s36 $ 76 L 116 t37 % 77 M 117 u38 & 78 N 118 v39 ‘ 79 O 119 w

Elements of Anarchy Manual 3

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