If the animation preset requires a stroke or fill color, the animation works only if you have assigned one to your text. Keep font, size, and styling in sync across. The Fill And Stroke category of animation presets contains presets that may change the fill color and stroke properties of the preset that you apply. Some things you can do with expressions are: Link multiple titles and update their styles at once (very useful for designing titles).

Use expressions to control text styling in any text expression or in Motion Graphics templates.

To reverse the effect simply duplicate the first keyframe and move it behind the second one. Edit the text styles and text properties using the expression controls. Note: The order of masks determines the order of the animation. You can play with the settings of the effect, but in general this should do what you want to achieve.

Go to your last frame and set the End value to 100%.

Click the stop watch of it to enable animation.

Go to your first frame and set the End value of the effect to 0%.

Tick All Masks option to make use of all masks.

Apply the stroke effect to the solid layer which should be full of masks now.

The properties of that shape, namely the stroke color, stroke height, stroke.

Note: you can create separate paths from an image of letters within After Effects with the auto trace option (Layer > Auto Trace) - use black and white option and set it to the current frame (Note: Tracing letters isn't really accurate) Adobe After Effects Adobe ColdFusion Adobe Creative Suite Adobe Dreamweaver.

Requirement is to have all of your paths from Illustrator as separate masks on the solid in After Effects.

Import your paths into after effects, pasting should also work with CTRL+ V.

Setup same document size as in After Effects.

Separate all letters with the path finder or ungroup it.

Simplest way is to use the Stroke Effect on a solid layer with separate letters as masks.

After effects animate stroke size