New in AE 25.0 build 26: Scripting Hooks for Font Fallback Management

Hi everyone,

Starting with AE 25.0.26 beta, we have introduced a number of new Font fallback management APIs, to help with defining new default fonts, and to ensure that a font has all the glyphs you will need to render any given text.

As always, we have updated the Scripting Documentation, where you will find more detailed information about these new APIs. Here is a quick overview of the new APIs:

Fonts.setDefaultFontForCTScript()

This function will set an instance of Font object mapped based on CTScript parameter.

After Effects uses these mappings when typing or applying a font where it finds that the font does not contain a glyph for the character. In this situation it will attempt to map the character to a CTScript value and then use this default mapping to select an alternate font which may have a glyph for the character.

Fonts.getDefaultFontForCTScript()

This function will return an instance of Font object mapped as the default font based on CTScript.

After Effects uses these mappings when typing or applying a font where it finds that the font does not contain a glyph for the character. In this situation it will attempt to map the character to a CTScript value and then use this default mapping to select an alternate font which may have a glyph for the character.

Font.hasGlyphsFor()

Fonts do not contain glyphs for all possible ranges of Unicode and this method gives the caller the opportunity to query the Font about support for one or more characters.

Font.otherFontsWithSameDict()

Given a FontObject passed as an argument, it will return an Array of FontObject instances which share the same font dictionary.

Fonts.getCTScriptForString()

This function will return an array of generic objects describing the number of characters in the range and the CTScript assigned to them.

CharacterRange.pasteFrom()

Copies, using paste semantics, from the characterRange parameter to the callee CharacterRange. The two instances may be the same, and the spans may be different.

As always we are interested in hearing about the successful use of these APIs and feedback on how they might be made better for your workflow.

Douglas Waterfall, John Colombo & Sébastien Périer

After Effects Engineering