With beta build 24.4/6 (available today) there are some changes to the way fonts are handled when they go missing which we want you to be aware - just in case any of you come across some weird behavior we should know about.
Fonts are troublesome, as you all know, and I continually get surprised by the range of behavior they manifest and consequently the code has to be prepared to deal with.
The high level summary is that since last year we have been observing crashes involving Projects being opened which contained references to missing Variable fonts. The crash seemed to be occurring after they were synced from Adobe Fonts and After Effects goes to update the missing font references with the newly installed font.
(This is one of those huge benefits we (and you) derive from customers' submitted crash reports - we see things go wrong in ways on your systems that we were not seeing on our own test environments. Once we see enough crash reports, we can know where to start looking and then (often) it becomes super obvious what went wrong in the code - though sometimes the fix is not so clear.)
Here are the changes you may (or may not) notice starting in this build:
- Less crashes when (some) Variable fonts are synced from Adobe Fonts.
- Less crashes when fonts are activated/installed or de-activated while the Project is open.
- Less scrambled glyphs when fonts are activated/installed or de-activated while the Project is open.
- Faster missing font replacement after Adobe Fonts has activated a missing font.
- 34 new Variable Adobe Fonts will now activate when opening Projects with missing references to them.
- Scripting app.project.usedFonts returns more accurate data, including at what time in a layer a Font is referenced.
- Scripting app.project.replaceFont() is more efficient and accurate.
I spent a few months on this revision so any change of this magnitude has to be approached very carefully but there are always surprises due to differences in the font environment.
So if you see something odd with this build, please submit the crash report, and also your email so I can get back to you and collect more information about what might be different in your environment than mine.
Douglas Waterfall
After Effects Engineering
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