Using the Premiere Pro Title Designer

Question

I keep seeing lots of discussions about the limitations of the Premiere Pro Title Designer.
It seemed like a good idea to point out some of the good things about it, just to get it out there for people new to Premiere Pro, or people who have not used the Title Designer much.
Just to get a couple of things out of the way, there is a problem with the way it handles partial transparency of Photoshop files and other images with an alpha channel, and no, you still can't animate individual parts of the title without making more titles to do the job. But you can put a logo from Photoshop on its own layer, and you can animate individual titles.
That said, have you looked lately at the ease in which you can create interesting fonts and shapes? Faster and easier in a title than in Photoshop or After Effects.
Something like this for example. I would not know where to begin to make this in After Effects or Photoshop or Illustrator.
And even more interesting is that the same exact font style can be applied to a shape. Like this:
Or this:
You can imagine how great it would look if I actually had any artistic ability!
Every time you do something to a font, you can save it as a new style in order to use it again later. In the same project, or a new one a year from now. You can group styles into libraries, you can replace the ones that came with Premiere Pro, (and get them back with a simple reset). You save the styles you use on shapes as a style.
For over a decade I have had Tim Kolb's free font styles and some templates on my web site here: http://www.stevengotz.com/title_styles.html
They are free. Have you been using them? If not, why not? And recently he has been putting more free styles on his own web site along with regularly releasing new, free, templates on his BLOG site at http://style4type.blogspot.com/
All I am saying is that if you have not looked at using the Title Designer lately, then perhaps you might want to take another look. Especially now that with Premiere Pro CC, it is so easy to make unique copies of existing titles without fear of overwriting the original.
Don't have CC? No sweat. These work with all versions of Premiere Pro as far as I can tell. (Please let me know if you discover otherwise.) The Title Designer has not changed much. Unfortunately. But it is still quite usable and I hate to see people go out and buy titling programs just to do something they could do for free in Premiere Pro.

Answer 1

Well, I have often wished we could animate the source text like we can in After Effects. Or wished we could have the great font style capability in After Effects that we have in Premiere Pro.
I just can't get both.
That is why I came up with the way to create many titles from one, using a Microsoft Word macro, but I can only get it to work in English, or, rather, I can't get it to work with non-ASCII characters.
The method that was found to do it with Adobe InDesign is great, but no font styles there either.
The magic that Tim makes with his font syles and backgrounds is just too strong a reason to work completely in Premiere Pro. So making a new title from another is the only way for me to to much of what I want to do. But once I get past a couple of dozen titles or so, I use the macro.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5983278#5983278