Cant animate my character level styling transform

A single word generated from Text+ is in Flow, we need to animate the letters manually - as if they are on a scrabble board , the intention is to make a 'grungy hand animated' element.
Charater level styling has been initialised and in the resulting modifier some controls appeared, the "allow manual kerning" button in the view has allowed individual letters to be transformed to taste.
It seems like the letters transform should be animateable but after much effort, defeat is admitted and I'm asking for advice.
Should I be doing this using an instance of text+ for each letter in my word?
Charater level styling has been initialised and in the resulting modifier some controls appeared, the "allow manual kerning" button in the view has allowed individual letters to be transformed to taste.
It seems like the letters transform should be animateable but after much effort, defeat is admitted and I'm asking for advice.
Should I be doing this using an instance of text+ for each letter in my word?