Feature Focus: Font System Improvements with ae23.5_13

After a very loooong journey I have finally merged a very significant revision with ae23.5_13 to the code in After Effects which manages Fonts.

Some example immediate benefits to this code revision:

• Apple’s SF Pro and New York, and other Open Type Variable fonts will start working properly.
• Duplicate fonts, by PostScript name, will show properly in the UI and also stop crashing After Effects.
• Copying and pasting text from Illustrator with a Open Type Variable font using custom design axes will come through correctly - After Effects UI still lags what AI offers but it is better than the useless “0 0 0” we used to show.
• The Char Panel UI is going to behave a little less wonky than before - it still has some flaws (ex: sample drawing, mixed selections) - but it is quicker and less sloppy at points.
• Substitute fonts, that is fonts which a Project asked for on open but did not exist, now show the PostScript name and font technology we know about. They sort at the bottom of the Char Panel.

The handling of Fonts is full of edge cases, too numerous to detail here, and it is these edge situations where things start to go wrong - we see these in the crash reports which customers such as yourselves has submitted - definitively proving that something that seems impossible, which we are unable to reproduce here on the team, really happened.

Looking at this wealth of data, and trying to puzzle out the impossible slowly revealed to me that there were lots of problems in some very old code too significant to just keep patching - so in the fall of last year I started in earnest to revise things and now 7 months later it is ready for pre-release.

Now, anything as large as this will fix a lot of problems, many that you may never have noticed, but it also inevitably reveals or creates new problems that I do not notice and it is these situations that I need your help to find out about.

For the most part, that is when Fonts have been working for you, I do not expect you to notice anything different at all - and I would sure like to know immediately if you do see something odd so I can chase it down.

It will be sloppy I expect for the next week or as I learn new things from your environments/workflows and attempt to sort them out - please be patient and as helfpul to me as you can through this time.

Expect to hear more from me on the change over the next two months.

Douglas Waterfall
After Effects Engineering