Adobe After Effects, (83::2) not ascii error [Solution]

[a.ksham]

Hopefully this can be a resource for some people who run into this error.

Running Windows 7. Other people who ran into this error seemed to encounter it under different circumstances, so I decided to just make a new topic. If mods feel like it should be elsewhere, feel free to move it - just trying to help get around this frustrating thing.

Recently I was using CC2018 on another machine and after changing the font of a text layer, it locked me into an error:

(83::2) not ascii

I was forced to close After Effects via Task Manager as the dialog was persistent. I had used the font before this in CS6, so it's something definitely in the newer versions. Sad how "upgrading" has caused more problems... I uninstalled the font for good measure to be safe. However, I had to use the font in question for this project, and I didn't want to raster the text from Photoshop and then bring it in - a lot more work for something that should be working by itself.

I went back to CS6 and selected another font, then went back to CC2018; it worked, so it was clearly something with the font that After Effects decided to not co-operate with. I fiddled around a bit more and concluded it wasn't that my font file was corrupt. Although the error message was incredibly vague, I figured a way to get around the error, due to the keyword "ascii". The TTF font in question had Asian (Japanese to be specific) characters in its name, so I suspected this was causing issues (for whatever awful reason), so your mileage may vary on this point.

I opened the font up in FontForge (though I suspect any font-editing program will work), and removed the offending (unicode) characters from the font's names.

Note: this is not the same as just renaming the file

In FontForge's case, you're looking for the names here:

• Element > Font Info > PS Name
• Element > Font Info > TTF Names

After that, I went to File > Generate Fonts... and generated a new font file, installed it... and everything seems to be working fine now.

Cheers, and I hope this helps someone.

[a.ksham · Accepted solution]

Was told by a friend to update this answer after they encountered it (small world), it seems the cause of the large number of error pop ups would be attributed to reading each individual glyph from font files with unsupported Unicode characters in its internal filename.

To be succint; the workaround in this specific situation is either uninstall the problematic font, or edit and rename its internal font name using a program like FontForge, which was mentioned in the original post.