PDF (adobe.com)

Enter paragraph text

When you enter paragraph text, the lines of text wrap to fit the dimensions of the bounding box. You can enter multiple paragraphs and apply paragraph formatting.

You can resize the bounding box at any time, which causes the text to reflow within the adjusted rectangle.

When you enter paragraph text, it has the properties set in the Character and Paragraph panels. You can change these properties later by selecting the text and modifying settings in the Character and Paragraph panels.

  1. Select the Horizontal Type tool  or the Vertical Type tool .
  2. Do one of the following in the Composition panel to create a text layer:

    • Drag to define a bounding box from a corner.

    • Alt-drag (Windows) or Option-drag (Mac OS) to define a bounding box around a center point.

    Note: The pointer for a type tool changes depending on whether it is over a text layer in the Composition panel. When the pointer is not directly over a text layer, it appears as a new text pointer ; drag to create a new text layer. Shift-drag always creates a new text layer.
  3. Enter text by typing. Press Enter on the main keyboard (Windows) or Return (Mac OS) to begin a new paragraph. Press Shift+Enter on the main keyboard (Windows) or Shift+Return (Mac OS) to create a soft carriage return, which begins a new line without beginning a new paragraph. If you enter more text than can fit in the bounding box, the overflow icon  appears on the bounding box.
    Note: You can also choose Edit > Paste to paste text that you have copied from any application that uses Unicode characters. Text receives the formatting of the first character in the text layer into which it is pasted.
  4. To end text-editing mode, press Enter on the numeric keypad, select another tool, or press Ctrl+Enter (Windows) or Command+Return (Mac OS).
After Effects doesn’t have a direct way to enter a non-breaking space between two words, but you can create a non-breaking space in Photoshop and copy it into After Effects. Select the two words in Photoshop (or at least the space and the following character), and then use the No Break option in the Photoshop Character panel to prevent the text from breaking after that space. Then copy the text from Photoshop and paste it into After Effects. The two words will be treated as independent words by a word-based selector, but they will also stay together on a line of paragraph text.