Feature Focus: Font System Improvements with ae23.5_13

[Douglas_Waterfall]

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

[Scott.C.]

Hello!

Thanks for doing this work! Probably seems thankless, but I appreciate whenever someone goes into the plumbing of AE and brings it out of the mid 90s and into the current decade os just want to say keep up the good work!

[Joost van der Hoeven]

Any timeframe :stopwatch:️ for emoji /full color :artist_palette: font support? Or is that part of this overhaul? 🫣

[Ron Ganbar]

Love that you've taken the time to do this work, @Douglas_Waterfall!

[Shebbe]

Always great to see someone revising old code and acknowledging it's sluggishness. I hope AE and Premiere will receive more 'core code' love in the future to make things a lot more stable and/or faster. Time to stop the bandaid fixes!
Thanks for the hard work.

[sskaz]

Doug, I have to say this new Font System saved my day/job. I was handed off a project started on Windows and opening it on my Mac was effectively broken and refused to render anything to screen and just chewing up CPU time without anything to show. After a bit of hair pulling and troubleshooting, I suspected font problems and decided to try opening the project using the beta version and the new font system.

Beta 23.5b44 opened it right away without any problems and helped me diagnose the problematic text layers and get things working again. Thanks for the hard work, Doug!

nitty gritty: seemed like v23.4 was trying to sub in Apple’s version of Montserrat instead of the Adobe Fonts version. I deactivated Apple’s version in Font Book, reactivated the Adobe Fonts version, and all is well.

[Douglas_Waterfall]

This is super great to hear and thanks for passing the good word along.

Douglas