After Effects: Font Changes Appearance

Forum|Forum|9 months ago
May 13, 2025
2 replies
814 views

Hi folks,

I'm working with the font "Mojito" from Adobe Fonts. It appears just fine in Illustrator and on the adobe fonts website.

However, it changes appearance in After Effects (notice e & o).

I've reset AE preferences and none of the faux text options are switched on.

What can I do to solve this?

Error or problem

Correct answer sskaz

Illustrator is swapping the characters with your font’s OpenType “contextual alternatives”. Unfortunately, After Effects doesn’t support any fancy typographic features that are supported in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, etc.

Your options are:

Disable the contextual alternatives in Illustrator, so nothing fancy happens that is unsupported in AE, and things match. Open the OpenType panel (Window > Type > OpenType) and then turn off the toggles along the bottom.
If you want to keep the typographic style:
- Save your Illustrator file and import it into AE as a standard layer.
- Convert your Illustrator type to outlines, and save and import it as a standard layer, or transfer the outlined shape using a tool like Overlord.

Only the first option would use native text layers in After Effects, so you could easily retype text and use Text Animators, etc..

There’s a feature request for this here with over 200 votes… (AE team has been doing a bit of work updating AE’s text engine, so hopefully features like this could be added someday.)

sskazCorrect answer

Inspiring

Illustrator is swapping the characters with your font’s OpenType “contextual alternatives”. Unfortunately, After Effects doesn’t support any fancy typographic features that are supported in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, etc.

Your options are:

Disable the contextual alternatives in Illustrator, so nothing fancy happens that is unsupported in AE, and things match. Open the OpenType panel (Window > Type > OpenType) and then turn off the toggles along the bottom.
If you want to keep the typographic style:
- Save your Illustrator file and import it into AE as a standard layer.
- Convert your Illustrator type to outlines, and save and import it as a standard layer, or transfer the outlined shape using a tool like Overlord.

Only the first option would use native text layers in After Effects, so you could easily retype text and use Text Animators, etc..

There’s a feature request for this here with over 200 votes… (AE team has been doing a bit of work updating AE’s text engine, so hopefully features like this could be added someday.)