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Finn Glink
Inspiring
February 1, 2024
Question

Automatically detect letters and change Glyph?

  • February 1, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 1538 views

Hey! 
I'm currently using Illustrator to change three letters into different glyphs (per the brand guide). Is there a way to do that automatically inside After Effects? I'm assuming the answer is no, since After Effects doesn't even support glyphs natively, but maybe anyone found a workaround?

Best,
Finn

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    February 1, 2024

    They need to properly be marked as stylistic alternates in the font itself and fall within specifc OT glyph ranges. If the font hasn't that logic built in, AE can't detect it. In such a case you may still be able to get the characters with an string.fromCharCode() or something like and that could be turned into a preset that does it automatically, including substituting characters as you type. It would probably be useful if you inspected the font in the charmap utility to check that stuff. If AI can do it, then it's pulling that info from somewhere based on the font panel settings and it may be possible to get AE to do it, too. A screenshot of that might also help us to provide further advice.

     

    Mylenium

    F
    Finn GlinkAuthor
    Inspiring
    February 1, 2024

    This goes a bit beyond my knowledge of how glyphs actually work, but I'll try to follow along as best as I can. Attached are two screenshots, one of the letters and their replacements, and one of the charmap (...assuming that's the charmap :D)
    The three replacement glyphs have a little addition to their name (U+00...), ss01, ss05 and ss07 (G, a and g).

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    February 1, 2024

    The long and short answer is how you place them inside your font and what the specific substitution rules are. That said, what's to stop you from just placing them inside the first 512 characters and manually entering the character codes or using copy & paste from another program? This even worked in the olden days when AE was much dumber and didn't even support a fraction of OpenType/ Unicode. Unless you have a big hunking universal font that covers a ton languages and exhausts all 32000 glyphs I can't see why this should be a problem.

     

    Mylenium

    F
    Finn GlinkAuthor
    Inspiring
    February 1, 2024

    Thank you! 
    I'm not the creator of the font and I'm not to mess with it. The letters "G", "g" and "a" have a second glyph that's to be used. I'm currently pasting the text into Illustrator, change the glyphs there and copy it back. While that works, I was wondering if that could be automated inside After Effects. 

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