Scripting Pre-Release Heads-Up: TextDocument might have changed unexpectedly

[Douglas Waterfall]

Hi:

We have been working diligently to add significant new capability to the TextDocument and, although we have not exposed any of the new APIs to you yet, in preparation for this we have changed a significant bit of the underlying architecture which TextDocument is built upon. These changes went into ae-beta/24.2.0/8.

Quite a lot of automated testing has been written to demonstrate that the existing TextDocument APIs behave exactly as before (and I mean exactly...), but errors may have slipped past us.

Consider this a heads up that we might have broken something and to please let us know if you encounter any regression when using the TextDocument - we really need to know.

Thanks in advance for your engagement, and we look forward to exposing these new APIs as soon as we can - we are confident they will be well received.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[Dan Ebberts]

Thanks for the heads-up. Is it possible any of the new TextDocument code has already found its way into the x5 and x6 releases? A number of our text-based scripts (including TypeMonkey, which has been working fine for 10 years now) no longer work, apparently due to an issue with sourceRectAtTime() unexpectedly (but not consistently) returning a width of zero for a new text layer. 

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Hi Dan:

The TextDocument changes ONLY first appeared in 8.

If you are seeing sourceRectAtTime() issues prior to that release then it is unrelated to this particular change.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[Douglas_Waterfall]

@Dan Ebberts it is sounding like the underlying text is not composed sometimes. Perhaps that explains the race condition. I will investigate this.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[Dan Ebberts]

Thanks for looking into this. It does seem to be a race condition of some sort. In my testing, sometimes it will fail a few consecutive times, but then it will work a bunch of times. I can't figure out what it is about TypeMonkey though, that causes it to fail 100% of the time (not always on the first word though).

[Douglas_Waterfall]

@Dan Ebberts, a proposed fix will be available in ae-beta 24.2.0/11

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[Dan Ebberts]

I just tested with 24.2.0/14 and the problem seems to be resolved. Thanks!

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Thank you for passing that on.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Now we can talk about why we were messing with the architeccture.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta-discussions/per-character-scripting-public-beta-an...

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering