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_nicdean
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 12, 2025

After Effects Fallback Fonts Broken for many languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Korean+)

  • July 12, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 216 views

Bug:

On Windows, After Effects fallback fonts are broken for 5 major international character languages: Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, and Korean.

 

When After Effects encounters these fonts, it uses "Myriad Pro" as a fallback font which does not contain characters for these languages. After Effects displays blank, missing text and it appears broken and empty. The text does not appear unless user manually changes to a font with supporting unicode characters. This bug is also in MOGRTs exported from AE / imported in PPro.

 

This bug is not present on Mac devices, and the languages correctly use the following fallback fonts on Mac:

  1. Arabic: Damascus
  2. Persian: Damascus
  3. Urdu: Damascus
  4. Hebrew: Arial
  5. Korean: Apple Gothic

 

The languages below display correctly on Windows with their appropriate fallback fonts:

  1. Chinese: Meiryo
  2. Japanese: Meiryo
  3. Hindi: Adobe Devanagari
  4. Bengali: Nirmala UI
  5. Telugu: Nirmala UI
  6. Russian: Myriad Pro

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Collectively, the 5 broken languages (Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, and Korean) are spoken by more than 1.5 billion people.

 

Please fix. It is easy to test this bug with a single text layer in After Effects on a Windows machine.

 

1 reply

_nicdean
Community Expert
_nicdeanCommunity ExpertAuthor
Community Expert
August 27, 2025

I've been periodically checking this, and one of the recent updates fixed fallback fonts on Windows for: Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Hebrew.

 

Now these all fallback to "Times New Roman". Times is an old font and looks dated by today's standards, especially for middle-eastern languages. A simple sans-serif font would be best. But it's better than being broken, so thanks! 

 

Unfortunately, Korean fallback fonts are still broken as of AE 25.4.0 and AE Beta 25.6.0.