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claudia2323
Known Participant
August 30, 2026

After Effects: font dropdown throws "Cannot create font [X]" repeatedly / freezes on scroll — survives full reinstall, fresh Windows account, and GPU driver rollback

  • August 30, 2026
  • 7 replies
  • 119 views

Background

I'm new to After Effects — I'm working through a beginner course and this is the first time I've actually tried to use the app for real (I'd previously only opened it a few times to follow along with a template's instructions, and didn't touch the type tool then). This issue showed up the first time I tried to change a font. To be clear, this isn't a "type tool is unfamiliar to me" issue — I've since done extensive troubleshooting (below), and everything else in After Effects seems to work normally: layers, effects, keyframing, rendering, other panels, other tools. The font dropdown/font-creation step is the only thing that's broken.

Summary

Opening the font dropdown in the Character panel (or Properties panel in the new UI) in After Effects triggers a warning dialog: "After Effects warning: Cannot create font '[font name]'." Clicking OK / pressing Escape does not resolve it — the dropdown either loops through repeated versions of this error and after a while for different fonts, and when the dropdown is open for a split second it shows almost nothing (sometimes just one entry) and errors immediately on whatever it tries to process first.

This is not tied to any specific font. Over the course of troubleshooting, the named font has included: a commercial third-party family (Tisa Sans Pro), two unrelated display fonts, and — critically — core Windows-bundled fonts that ship on every Windows install and cannot normally be uninstalled: Terminal, Arial Narrow, Small Fonts, and Segoe UI Light. The specific font named changes between attempts, which points away from a corrupt individual font file and toward something in After Effects' font-handling/rendering pipeline itself.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Create a new project and a new composition in it (happens in a brand-new, empty project too — not specific to any one project file).
  2. Add a background (solid/shape layer).
  3. Type a line of text with the type tool.
  4. Highlight the text/select the text layer, then open the Character panel (or Properties panel in the new UI) and click the font family dropdown.
  5. "After Effects warning: Cannot create font '[font name]'" appears. Dismissing it (OK/Escape) re-triggers the same warning for the same font repeatedly — often 5–10+ times in a row — before either moving on to error on a different font, or the dialog stops appearing entirely for that attempt. Even after it stops, trying to open the font dropdown again immediately restarts the whole loop from scratch. The dropdown itself, when it does briefly open, shows only a partial/near-empty list and errors on whatever it tries to load first.

System info

  • After Effects version: 23.3.0 (Build 87)
  • OS: Windows 11 Home 64-bit, version 26200 (build 10.0.26100.9168), German system language
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K (20 logical processors), ~3.6GHz
  • RAM: 128 GB
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Studio Driver 32.0.16.1047 (rolled back one version from a driver that had auto-updated the day before, to rule out a driver regression — see #12 below)
  • Display: 3840×2160 @ 60Hz, HDR-capable primary monitor at 125% scaling (300% "recommended"), plus a second 1920×1080 monitor at 100% scaling (no mismatch there — see #13)
  • Creative Cloud desktop app: freshly reinstalled current version (see #9 below)

What I've already ruled out

I've gone through an extensive elimination process, roughly in this order:

  1. Third-party font manager (MainType). Fully quit the app, and later fully uninstalled all non-system fonts through it (with a full reboot). Issue persists even with a minimal, stock-Windows-only font set.
  2. Adobe Fonts / Creative Cloud font sync. Disabled the Adobe Fonts service entirely in Creative Cloud desktop preferences. No change.
  3. Windows "Block untrusted fonts" (Exploit Protection). Checked and disabled the per-app override for AfterFX.exe. No change.
  4. Per-user vs. system-wide font installation. Investigated in depth (including a detour through Windows 11's per-user font install location and "Install for all users" duplication issue) — ruled out as the cause once the failure reproduced with a completely minimal, system-fonts-only environment.
  5. Font file corruption. Ruled out once the error started naming core, unmodifiable Windows system fonts (Terminal, Arial Narrow, Small Fonts, Segoe UI Light) in addition to third-party ones.
  6. Adobe's font cache. Closed all Adobe processes and deleted every AdobeFnt* file system-wide, then rebooted before testing. No change.
  7. Windows system file integrity. Ran sfc /scannow — reported no integrity violations.
  8. After Effects installation itself. Fully removed After Effects using the Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool (not just a normal uninstall) and did a completely fresh reinstall. No change.
  9. Creative Cloud desktop app AND every installed Creative Cloud app. Used the Cleaner Tool to fully remove Creative Cloud desktop and all installed CC apps (not just After Effects), in case this was a cross-app font-handling issue rather than something isolated to AE, then did a completely fresh reinstall of everything. No change.
  10. After Effects preferences. Reset via Ctrl+Alt+Shift on launch (full preferences wipe, not just a project-level issue). No change.
  11. Windows user profile. Tested under a completely separate, unrelated Windows user account with no font manager, no prior AE preferences, and no history in this troubleshooting. Same error occurs there too (failed on Segoe UI Light).
  12. GPU driver. Rolled back the NVIDIA Studio Driver to the version installed immediately before a recent update, using the "Install a previous version" option in the NVIDIA app. No change.
  13. Display/DPI scaling. Dug into this at length after noticing the font dropdown rendered a decorative/vector font (Segoe Script) correctly while failing right next to a plain system font (Segoe UI Light). My primary 4K monitor shows "300% empfohlen" (recommended) but is manually set to 125% (300% would be unreadable); a second monitor is at 100% with no mismatch at all. Tested: all three "Override high DPI scaling behavior" compatibility modes for AfterFX.exe (Application, System, System Enhanced) — no change (though "System Enhanced" visibly changed how the composition viewer scaled, confirming AE's rendering pipeline does react to this setting, just not in a way that fixes the bug). Also moved the entire AE window onto the second monitor (100%/100%, zero scaling mismatch) and retested there — same error. This rules out display scaling/DPI mismatch as the cause.
  14. Missing "Adobe Clean" shared font component. This is the most significant finding so far. After Effects' font-loading fallback appears to depend on Adobe's own bundled UI font, "Adobe Clean" (used internally when a font fails to load cleanly — several Adobe bug reports describe the exact same looping-across-different-fonts symptom being caused by this fallback font itself being missing or broken). Checked my system directly: there is no Adobe Clean font file anywhere — not in C:\Windows\Fonts, and C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts (where it would normally live) does not exist at all, even immediately after the full Cleaner Tool wipe-and-reinstall of AE, Creative Cloud desktop, and every CC app described in #9. I had "Adobe Fonts" sync disabled in Creative Cloud desktop preferences since before that reinstall (to rule it out as a variable); re-enabled it and let it sync, then rechecked — still no Adobe Clean file, still the same error. Adobe Clean does not appear to be available as a normal activatable font through Adobe Fonts (fonts.adobe.com) the way regular library fonts are, so there's no obvious self-service way to (re)install it.
  15. Other Creative Cloud apps. The font dropdown/font list works completely normally in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Premiere Pro on this same machine — full font list, no errors, no looping. This only happens in After Effects, which argues against a system-wide, shared-across-all-apps font problem and points more specifically at something in After Effects' own font-handling code path (it may simply be stricter about, or more dependent on, the missing Adobe Clean component than the other apps are).

At this point the issue reproduces on: a fresh Windows user profile, a fresh After Effects install, a fresh Creative Cloud desktop install, a minimal/stock font environment, a system with clean SFC results, a rolled-back GPU driver, both display-scaling configurations available to me, and both Adobe Fonts sync states — while every other Creative Cloud app on the same machine handles fonts without any issue. That rules out essentially everything within normal user control, and narrows this down to something specific to After Effects' own font-loading pipeline, quite possibly its handling of the missing "Adobe Clean"/shared font component that ships alongside AE and Creative Cloud desktop but doesn't seem to be required the same way by the other apps. I found several existing bug reports describing what looks like the same underlying issue (see links below), where the only resolution documented was Adobe engineering directly providing the affected user a working copy of the font files — not something fixable from the user side.

Question for the community / Adobe

Has anyone seen this specific pattern — font dropdown failing on core Windows system fonts (not just third-party ones), the "Adobe Clean" shared font component and its Common Files\Adobe\Fonts folder being entirely absent even after a full Cleaner Tool reinstall of AE and every Creative Cloud app, surviving a fresh Windows profile, unaffected by display scaling, and yet isolated to After Effects while Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign/Premiere Pro on the same machine handle fonts fine? This looks closely related to these existing reports, but none of them show a self-service fix — only cases where Adobe engineering manually supplied working font files:

  • https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-528/unable-to-create-agm-font-adobe-clean-bold-in-after-effects-1215991
  • https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-528/after-effects-warning-unable-to-create-agm-font-adobe-clean-bold-unresolved-ae-bug-1216082
  • https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-528/bug-report-after-effects-25-0-1-error-messages-when-changing-fonts-on-file-1215647

Could Adobe support/engineering provide a working copy of the Adobe Clean font files (and confirm the correct install location/registration) for my system, the way was done in the threads above? Happy to provide additional logs/screenshots on request.

Screenshot

 

 

(Note: Claude helped me during the entire troubleshoot and I've asked it to summarize everything we've tried for this post)

 

 

    7 replies

    Nishu Kushwaha
    Community Manager
    Nishu KushwahaCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    September 3, 2026

    Thanks for trying the steps. I tried to research internally and turns out this issue already been logged as a bug. The team is working on a fix.

    I’ll follow up on this thread when there’s an update. I’ve moved your post from Questions to Bugs.

     

    Best,

    Nishu

    claudia2323Author
    Known Participant
    September 4, 2026

    Hi Nishu,

    Thanks a lot for getting back to me, even though it's not the solution I was hoping for. Do you happen to know if the font picker might get updated in the next major After Effects version, like it did last year for Photoshop and Illustrator? That would at least give me some hope this gets fixed along with it.

    Also, would you mind removing my log file from the earlier post? I noticed afterward that it contains my email address and I don't have permission to edit it myself.

    Thanks, Claudia

    Nishu Kushwaha
    Community Manager
    Nishu KushwahaCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    September 4, 2026

    Hi Claudia, I'm not sure when the fix will make it to a release, but I can say for sure that this is under investigation and the product team is working on it. Really sorry for the inconvenience and I appreciate your patience.

    I've removed the log file you shared. Let me know if there are any other questions.


    Thanks,

    Nishu

    claudia2323Author
    Known Participant
    August 31, 2026

    Quick follow-up with more detail on what's actually happening in the dropdown, in case it's useful to anyone looking into this (or to Adobe):

    I found a way to get a much closer look at what the dropdown is doing internally. It started by accident: I opened a downloaded template whose text layer referenced a font that isn't installed/activated on my system (shown as [FontName] in brackets in the dropdown). Fonts in that "not activated" state get grouped into their own section at the very bottom of the alphabetical list, and that section doesn't seem to trigger the crash — so I was able to open the dropdown on that layer without an immediate error.

    From there, dragging the scrollbar's thumb directly — not scrolling with the mouse wheel — let me move up through the rest of the list live, without the crash firing. Mouse wheel scrolling (or clicking to select a font directly) triggers the error immediately; dragging the scrollbar thumb does not, and the list actually scrolls and renders live while dragging. The crash only fires once the mouse button is released.

    This let me actually watch the list's behavior in detail, and it revealed several things:

    • Most of the list stays visually empty at any given scroll position — only a portion of the rows in view actually populate/render at once.
    • The scrollbar thumb itself can become visually invisible while dragging upward, even though it's still functional (dragging and scrolling keep working).
    • For each font row, the name text renders fine, but the preview/sample shown next to the name is empty for certain entries — unlike the entry directly above it, which shows its preview correctly. Once the list hits one of these "broken preview" entries, the previews for entries after it in that batch also fail to render.
    • The fonts affected by this aren't limited to any particular type, source, or quality — they include core Windows system fonts, legitimate commercial families (Linotype, FontFont), and other regular installed fonts. It isn't tied to "bad" or obscure fonts.
    • Releasing the mouse after this drag-scroll then fires the "Cannot create font" errors one after another (I've seen 20+ in a row) for the fonts whose previews failed to render, starting from the bottom of the scrolled range and working upward.

    Put together, this points specifically at the font preview/thumbnail rendering in the dropdown as the broken piece — not font loading, not the font files themselves, and not specific to any one font, vendor, or type. This also lines up with the timing of Adobe's newer font-picker features (variable font filtering shipped a few months ago) — the preview rendering introduced or changed alongside that update looks like a strong candidate for what's actually crashing.

    Here is a screen recording of me scrolling up the list as described above, so you can see what gets rendered in the dropdown and what doesn’t. 

     

    Nishu Kushwaha
    Community Manager
    Nishu KushwahaCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    August 31, 2026

    Hi Claudia,


    Thanks for the detailed post. This issue looks different from the "Unable to Create AGM Font" error, but I've seen a few users affected by the issue you're having.

    A few questions:

    1. Is there a reason you're on 23.3.0 specifically (project compatibility, plugin dependency, etc.), or is it just what got installed?

    2. Can you genereate the log file ans share? Here's how:

    1. Launch After Effects.

    2. Help menu > Enable Logging.

    3. Restart After Effects.

    4. Reproduce the issue (perform the action that triggers the crash or bug).

    5. Restart After Effects again, then go to Help menu > Reveal Logging Files.

    6. Locate After Effects Log.txt, open it in a text editor (Notepad, VS Code, TextEdit), and paste the contents into your reply (or attach the file directly).

    Looking forward to your response.


    Thanks,

    Nishu

    claudia2323Author
    Known Participant
    August 31, 2026

    Hi ​@Nishu Kushwaha, 

    Thanks for your reply.

    1. That was actually a typo - I’m on 26.3.0. Thanks for catching that.
    2. I’ve attached the log file since it’s fairly long. 

    Looking forward to your response.

    Thanks, 

    Claudia

    claudia2323Author
    Known Participant
    August 30, 2026

    Update: found a partial workaround, and it might help narrow down where the bug lives.

    I can keep working despite the broken dropdown: type the text with the desired font already applied in Illustrator (or any other Creative Cloud app on this machine — see #15 in the original post, they all handle fonts fine), select it, copy it (Ctrl+C), and paste it directly into a text layer in After Effects. This carries the font over correctly without ever touching AE's broken font-family dropdown. Once pasted this way, the style sub-dropdown (Thin, Italic, Bold, etc.) works completely normally, and every other property (size, color, tracking, etc.) can be edited as usual in AE. Only the top-level font-family selection dropdown itself is broken.

    I hope this info is useful beyond just being a workaround: it seems to show that the font itself loads and renders fine once applied, and that the style-variant list works fine too once a family is already set — so whatever's actually broken seems narrower than "fonts are broken in AE," more like it's specifically something in how the font-family dropdown builds its list. Not sure if that helps pin it down, but wanted to share in case it's useful to whoever looks at this.

    One more thought: I wonder if my issue has something to do with the new font picker / variable font filtering that got introduced a few months ago, or with the font preview shown in the list. I looked for a way to turn font previews off in Preferences but couldn't find one.

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