I'm not an After Effects user, however, just to assist with your issue, I just typed in Arabic, changed the font to different typeface, I didn't encounter the issue. Please provide more details so we may replicate the problem at our end.
My settings: Mac OS Big Sur v.11.6 • After Effects v. 18.4.1
Hello! I'm an Adobe Creative Cloud Subscriber and have the latest versions of everything I use.
I'm currently working a campaign which involves various languages being copied from excel files and pasted into animated text layers in After Effects. Nothing too complicated.
I am experiencing the same issue. This issue actually begins years ago when I discovered while creating promotional material for a campaign in various languages that After Effects did not display certain languages correctly.
Even after setting preferences for type correctly and making sure the languages that needed it read right to left.
After effects was downright omitting characters or showing them differently from the excel file. Which is confusing to me since the excel file existed on the same computer that After Effects did. why would Excel display the font characters correctly and not AE? This would lead me to trying to find specific fonts online that other creators claim worked better for each specific language that needed this help. Even that didn't help.
Now while I have found some new info such as going to the Paragraph box and hitting reset paragraph with the text selected actually does something and seems to then display the pasted text correctly. Worked great for Hindi. But now attempting to do the same with Arabic using the fonts Noto Sans, Adobe Arabic, Al Bayan or Nadeem results in constant crashing while doing anything to adjust the text layer. especially touching the Text Box and resizing it. Crash every time. I launch crash reports everytime it happens.
Does it crash while working with a specific font? If so, try reinstalling that font or try contacting the font manufacturer. If that's not the case, is there anything specific that triggers the crash? Also, please share the crash report.
Does it work fine with the other fonts? Could you try reinstalling the Arabic fonts that you mentioned above? Also, do you see any error message or crash report?