symbol font not working

[David329107447quo]

I have a project that I've inherited. It used the Symbol font. I see that it does not show up on Mac or PC. It does however work fine in Illustrator. 

Is there a reason for this? I can't find a workaround

Dave

[Kartika Rawat]

 Hi David329107447quo!

Sorry to hear that. Which version of After Effects are you using? Does it happen with a specific font? 

Let us know.

Thanks,

KR

[David329107447quo]

Hi

The font is Symbol as mentioned in the subject. I believe it's a system font. This works fine in Illustrator and Photoshop

[David329107447quo]

also I'm using the very latest version of AE, but I tried it in 2023 and it did not work there either

[ShiveringCactus]

I have just tried and you're right, it's not displaying for me either.

My replication steps:

• Added a new text layer
• Typed some text to ensure I could view it.
• Selected the text
• In the character panel, set the font to Symbol.

I assume this is a bug, so either you have to repost or contact a moderator to change the tag on your original post.  I'll try contacting the mods too.

[David329107447quo]

This is already in the bug thread, so hopefully it gets treated as such

[nishu_kush]

Thanks for pointing it out. We've filed a bug for the issue.

Best,

Nishu

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Fonts are confusing, and reports of font failures are usually confusing as well - "works for me!" is a common outcome.

The original post is not clear enough (for me) to know what the problem is there - there is a font named Symbol provided by Apple on the Mac. It shows up for me on the font dropdown in the Character Panel. So it is installed and does appear.

A bit later down though, we have a sample usage in After Effects - clearly the font DID appear there as well - but there are blanks in the typing.

The reason for the latter is that the Symbol font does not contain glyphs for roman/latin letters. It does contains number and symbols.

What IS interesting to me is that we get blank glyphs instead of anything else - and that should not be happening.

Usually when the selected font does not have a glyph for a typed character, and silent fallback occurs to a different font which then supplies the glyph. This is called FontLocking here internally and I have made mention of this elsewhere in the forums.

Why we do not fallback to something else properly I am interested in - investigating both failure issues and exposing more control over which fonts are used during fallback is on my list. So this is a useful report to me, thanks for sending it on.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering