Convert illustrator text layer to live text layers

I appreciate both the responses and share in your hope that the combined forums will generate better communication as well as fostering consideration from both sides. I certainly have been much less cranky lately because things have been noticeably improving, both in the app and in communication from the team, particularly in the beta forum. It's amazing what a little mutual communication can serve when you have felt invisible for so long.

Now to get back to being cranky...

Warren, as for following the blog, I certainly check it out but I'm not reporting longstanding bugs or feature requests to a blog, I reported those to the very place I was instructed to by Adobe. So please stop telling me what I already know, the entire point of what I and hundreds of other users complained about was that we didn't get a comment, much less "Under Consideration" marked, even less "Completed" on the majority of top voted requests. Please do go through the good old Uservoice page and find the requests for these features and how many years they took...oh wait, you can't anymore because they deleted the old board and all the moved comment dates are wrong. I also don't consider reintroducing features that were inexplicably removed "new features", and while I'm grateful for the new presets, I'm not going to celebrate given the 17 year wait.

You see there is a precedent for my particular brand of cranky, several years ago I was using a Retina iMac which for a variety of reasons would not cooperate with the latest version of After Effects. It took Adobe two years to fix it, even with multiple users complaining, broken promises and little communication or acknowledgement from Adobe. This was the beginning of my distrust for Adobe (although their crushing of Macromedia should have been.) To further date myself, I have been working with After Effects since 1993, professionally since 1995, so please don't color me as naive. The precedent of poor communication was not set by me.

But again, here's to a much brighter future!

@jackthegiantkiller 

I get your frustration, but it seems you may not be following Adobe Blogs or when feature requests go from "under consideration" to "completed".

The After Effects team has long communicated their work on improving performance.  I've found being able to have a New Viewer open with a Preview running for a downstream Comp while making adjustments in an upstream Comp and see those changes update while the downstream Comp Preview is still running to be nothing short of fantastic, not to mention being able to edit parameters, nudge keyframes, trim and extend Layer times spans, and so forth while a Preview is running in the current Comp.

At least three of the new features in the latest release of After Effects are user requests: MAX 2022: New After Effects features shipping and in public Beta.

@jackthegiantkiller I can personally confirm @Szalam's assertion that we read every post on UserVoice, to our own detriment in some cases. Unfortunately, that platform worked against us in many ways that I won't detail here. It took time, but we've moved the bug reporting and feature requests here to the Adobe Community so that we can have better (actual) conversations with you about how we can improve After Effects. We acknowledge that we weren't as responsive as we would have liked to be, and moving the forums is how we are actively working to improve that.

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

I am reassured to know that the team read everything, but their lack of response both in the UserVoice and general boards is absolutely inexcusable. I don't need to reiterate how many years some of the top requests were completely, utterly ignored even while the community was begging just to have something tagged as under consideration. The team couldn't even muster that slight effort, so don't be surprised when we respond with scorn. 

@jackthegiantkiller 

The After Effects team was 100% looking at the UserVoice request pages. I know because I've talked with them about it many times. EVERY post on there was read by a team member. There just wasn't a lot of feedback from them on there. Hopefully moving it to these forums will help facilitate better feedback.

Yes, exactly, they aren't mind readers. They also weren't reading the UserVoice pages either, so we were basically throwing years of ideas at a wall. Years. I have been asking for this for years, and since they moved all these posts they now have the same date, so you talk like I'm just coming out of the woodwork. Thank you for the explanation, still does not excuse the lack of function nor essential interoperability in a suite that is supposed to work like a team. Find a freaking hack if you must, I don't care.

@jackthegiantsla

Regarding "it's ridiculous that we can import live text from a rasterized file but not an intrinsically similar vector file":

It does seem like text should just be text, right?

Early versions of After Effects didn't have Text Layers and we relied on an effect to create text.  It was, simply put, dreadful.  Then the After Effects team reworked the Photoshop Text Engine to work in After Effects and like magic we have text layers in After Effects that match Photoshop Text Layers with the corresponding method to "convert to editable text".

Unforutnately for those of use that create source footage for After Effects in Illustrator, Illustrator uses its own source code for Text Objects - not Photoshop's.

@jackthegiantkiller 

Well, no one on the After Effects team is a mind reader.  So, it's up to us to upvote the features that are important to us.

Making this happen sooner than later requires a lot of votes and most likely that the Illustrator team be aware of it as well.  

Honestly, you'd think that Adobe would, at the very least, want all their toys to play nicely with one another. This is so beyond basic, so beyond essential workflow that I cannot fathom why Adobe can't just make this happen. Stop making us buy 3rd party plugins to allow apps in your own universe to coexist.