New AE update flips everything for RTL languages

Thanks a lot Douglas. I appreciate your time and all the explanation. I'll disable Smart Quotes for now. 

I totally understand the difficulties when it comes to dealing with Arabic or other RTL languages as they behave completely diferently.

You explained that very clearly - and I can read between the lines.

Perhaps using the ME text engine had the side effect of picking up the language as well? Speculating on that.

What appears behind the scenes is that when insert of a magic quote takes place we notice that SmartQuotes is turned on, then look at the Language setting/attribute/property at the insertion point and use that to determine what unicode character should be used for open/close quotes.

Since the Language setting/attribute/property appears to be hard coded to English, with no exposed way to change it, that would explain why it is not working as needed for any other language. Hmm.

Thank your for reporting this, and working through the explanation with me. I now see how ridiculously annoying this is for any RTL language. Essentially SmartQuotes should be disabled when working with those languages.

I will need to think further about this. Exposing Language on the Character Panel is might open up a can of worms.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

Hi @Douglas_Waterfall -

Did the smart quotes ever work for RTL languages?

Yes, they did. Earlier versions of AE 2022 were supporting that.

However, with these versions, there was an option in Settings > Type that allowed to switch from Latin text engine to Middle Eastern text engine. This option is not available now, as I think the app natively supports RTL languages.

I've redownloaded AE 22.0 to give you a screenshot. Do note that it's unviable for my wide company members to go back to that version as it's completely broken and crashes a lot.

it appears to me to always default to English.

I think I understand what you mean, but in any language, the quote marks are never outwards.

Other Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator) don't have that issue on new versions. 

Also, unlike AE, they have an option to change the language in Paragraph settings if the fonts support certain glyphs or Hindi/Arabic digits.

I hope I explained this in a good way.

Thanks!

Hi Shadi:

Did the smart quotes ever work for RTL languages?

Wandering through the code (lot to wander through) I have my serious doubts.

Some code needs to supply the language to use when interpreting the smart quote and it appears to me to always default to English.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

@Douglas_Waterfall 

It behaves irregularly no matter what font you're using. I think you might need to try Ariel or Times New Roman instead of Mac fonts as they don't have the smart quotes. 

Below is a screenshot of how the quote marks appear when I type in Arabic, no matter what text direction I use, and no matter what font, they go outwards instead of inwards. 

And for MOGRTs, it manifets the same way yes. Resulting in the wrong quotation marks.

As for the quotes...they seem to be behaving in a logical manner to me, but perhaps I am just confused about what is expected.

What font are you using? Does this behavior change with the font used?

Playing with Damascus and SF Arabic shows up some subtleties.

You mention mogrts - does this manifest the same way in a Text Layer in After Effects?

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

Thanks @Douglas_Waterfall. Yeah, I figured that out, and started flipping all ranges.

What about the other thing, the quotation marks? I tried every workaround and with me utilizing MOGRTs it's not viable to copy and paste the right marks in the text fields.

Hi Shadi:

Your mention of values are flipped from 0 to 100 caught my eye and I am going to make an assumption here that you are referring to Text Animation. If so, well then this is expected.

There was a long standing bug in RTL text animation where the code assumed that the character order of the animation was the same as the glyph order. That is certainly true for left to right languages, but of course not for RTL.

A common partial workaround was to run the animation in the opposite direction (thus flipping the 0-100) but as I say that was only partial because it still failed with lines, and a number of other cases.

With the fix in, everything RTL started behaving exactly like it should have from the beginning but that left all these old workaround which now did something different than before.

You will need to visit all your text animation ranges and flip them to match what they would have been if the bug had existed in the first place - we had considered at the time we fixed the bug whether it was possible to have done this automatically for customers but could not find a safe way to do so.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering