Characters Move Independently In Single Text Object Objective



To use a single text object where each character of the text moves in their own unique manner.

Detail



I want to be able to use one text object to create an animation where characters move onto the screen one by one. The way each character moves onto the screen is slightly complex, so I want to premake it myself for the rest of the unknown number of characters to follow. I also want to set the delay between when a character starts its animation and when the next character starts its animation.

The reason why I only want to use only one text object is because the amount of characters that are being animated are unknown and can vary. Additionally, I want to be able to press tab to edit the text and type it in with ease where it will automatically determine how the characters are going to be animated based on the presets that I made (the animation path I made for all the characters to follow at different times and the delay between each one).

Normally if I wanted to have the characters move independently, I would need to separate each character into their own text boxes and manually copy the animations. This will be troublesome if the entire length changes.

Additionally by putting each character into their own text objects, it would be hard to judge the distance between each character (and imagine if I have to change the text).

By changing the length of the single textbox, it will also change the amount of characters needed to animated. This will also change the amount of time need to finish the animation. However blank spaces will not add any time as they have no animation and will be skipped.

Final



So can someone please help me and show me how to do this in Blender Render. It may involve Python and although I have learnt a little bit of Python a long time ago, I have no clue of how Blender interprets them and it's libraries so bare with me.
Image above showing extents of individual characters in a single Blender Text Object.

Some miscellaneous points.


For ease of expressiveness, in the not quite so long run, I suggest you animate either single letter text objects or the mesh converted objects.
You may want to search for a script which already does what you want.
Text can follow path as a whole quite easily.  Having each character follow a different path requires more work.  Link for various approaches ...How-To: Text Sliding out of a Circle 2D
Your statements lead me to believe you want characters following individual paths.






In the image above we see the Blender Python Console window.  We have probed the location and dimension of a text object.  You see the X-axis value increase as I add letters.  Subtraction required for individual character location perhaps other considerations.  I have not found a more abstract probe for individual substrings of a larger string.






In the image above is a text editor window with an executed script.  The blue balls have been placed at right side x axis of each letter.  Thus the script has some reasonable knowledge of extents in the x direction.  You can store the measurements in a Python list if that suits you.
Inspect, Verify and Improve the script.
Know that text character placement may not be as easy as placing a cube.  Text characters have their own sense of orientation and aesthetics.  Baseline for example.  If you separate characters of a text object take care to notice any adjustments to the individual origins.  
If you have final placement of the single objects whether text or mesh you can keyframe those positions as final positions.  Then your animation can occur close enough to those final positions.  For example a path which gets close enough to your final position can ease out its influence.
There is more left for you to discover.