Font showing in font list in AE but when I type on a text layer it switches to Myriad Pro

[Finn McNeill]

Don't know if this is a bug or not but it's a bespoke font installed to my mac fontbook - I have worked with this font before with no issues - even if I try to click the text layer and switch the font, nothing happens and it switches to Myriad Pro. Bug or me?

[Finn McNeill]

I have done further testing and this is infact happning will all fonts - reverting to Myriad Pro

[Douglas_Waterfall]

I can take a guess...(though you state that you worked with this font before with no issues so I dunno.)

Fonts do not always contain glyphs for all the characters you might wish to enter.  My guess based on your description that you've typed a character, or the character where you are trying to the font to, is not supported by the font.

After Effect, to be nice,  tries to get around this issue - because without a glyph for the character you are going to get a blank or no-def glyph - by switching to another font which HAS a glyph for the character. This action in AE is named "FontLocking" which I have mentioned before in the forums.

AE does not notify you, nor does it provide any mechanism to select perhaps a different fallback font. It has been on my list for some time now to try to expose this functionality at least through scripting.

There is no UI in After Effects to peer into the font to see what characters are supported - but Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop have the Glyph Panel which will allow you to do this. Font Book can be used to peer into the font and see what characters are supported as well.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[Roland Kahlenberg]

I've these poltergeist-like Myriad Pro appearances too.  😄

Might be a good idea to have a real font to replace such occurrences.

Perhaps have a clearly named, "Adobe-Temp-Font" ; a temp font instead of using an existing font as the temp/replacement, may be a good start for users to know something is amiss and AE KNOWS the issue exists.If a more specific message can be provided then so much better.

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Hi @Roland Kahlenberg 

Ah, if it was only that easy - though I recognize your underlying point that it is confusing and problematic when this happens. But it is not that Myriad Pro is "the fallback font" - it is only one of the possible fallback fonts.

What happens under the covers is that there is a table which conceptually slices up the Unicode ranges into "ScriptType".

kRomanScript = 0,
kJapaneseScript,
kTraditionalChineseScript,
kSimplifiedChineseScript,
kKoreanScript,
kArabicScript,
kHebrewScript,
kGreekScript,
kCyrillicScript,
kDevanagariScript,
...

When typing ASCII characters, those are going to map to the kRomanScript ScriptType.

If the selected/active Font does not contain a glyph for the Character, then first the code figures out what ScriptType the Character maps to, then it goes and asks some other code please give me a default font for this ScriptType. From that request out pops a reference to one of the installed Fonts and that is what we change the Font to.

It appears, at least on Mac, that Myriad Pro is the default font for kRomanScript. I just tried pasting in a Korean Unicode character and got back Apple Gothic. So your mileage is going to vary depending on what Unicode you type and what Fonts have installed on your machine.

As I have said, exposing these rules to the user is interesting to me - there might be several candidate Fonts which could be switched to. Perhaps the intelligent user might like to have a say in what this mapping is.

Imagine that you are building a automated templating system and you know that a Roman Font and a Japanese Font work visually work well together - how might you arrange for that?

Anyway, we got what we got at this point but I do wanted to let you know that it is something I am aware of and also interested in sharing a conversation about it.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[Roland Kahlenberg]

Thanks @Douglas_Waterfall for the very informative insight. 

Unfortunately, I haven't had time to take the new text styling tricks for a drive. I have been thinking of these in my head. And I THINK I've managed to get delimeters to work on multiple-lined text strings. Needs more testing and especially so when Text Reflow/Dynamic Text Width is enabled.