Automatically detect letters and change Glyph?

[Finn Glink]

Hey! 
I'm currently using Illustrator to change three letters into different glyphs (per the brand guide). Is there a way to do that automatically inside After Effects? I'm assuming the answer is no, since After Effects doesn't even support glyphs natively, but maybe anyone found a workaround?

Best,
Finn

[Mylenium]

The long and short answer is how you place them inside your font and what the specific substitution rules are. That said, what's to stop you from just placing them inside the first 512 characters and manually entering the character codes or using copy & paste from another program? This even worked in the olden days when AE was much dumber and didn't even support a fraction of OpenType/ Unicode. Unless you have a big hunking universal font that covers a ton languages and exhausts all 32000 glyphs I can't see why this should be a problem.

Mylenium

[Finn Glink]

Thank you! 
I'm not the creator of the font and I'm not to mess with it. The letters "G", "g" and "a" have a second glyph that's to be used. I'm currently pasting the text into Illustrator, change the glyphs there and copy it back. While that works, I was wondering if that could be automated inside After Effects. 

[Mylenium]

They need to properly be marked as stylistic alternates in the font itself and fall within specifc OT glyph ranges. If the font hasn't that logic built in, AE can't detect it. In such a case you may still be able to get the characters with an string.fromCharCode() or something like and that could be turned into a preset that does it automatically, including substituting characters as you type. It would probably be useful if you inspected the font in the charmap utility to check that stuff. If AI can do it, then it's pulling that info from somewhere based on the font panel settings and it may be possible to get AE to do it, too. A screenshot of that might also help us to provide further advice.

Mylenium

[Finn Glink]

This goes a bit beyond my knowledge of how glyphs actually work, but I'll try to follow along as best as I can. Attached are two screenshots, one of the letters and their replacements, and one of the charmap (...assuming that's the charmap :D)
The three replacement glyphs have a little addition to their name (U+00...), ss01, ss05 and ss07 (G, a and g).

[Finn Glink]

Hey Mr. Mylenium! 
I've looked a bit more into this. Selecting a letter to replace (in this case "replace(/a/gi,variablename)") works great, and using "variablename = String.fromCharCode()" replaces wonderfully, I can't seem to find my alternate letters (residing in the stylistic sets "ss01" and "ss05") in that list. After looking further inside FontForge, these stylistic sets have a unicode value of -1, so I don't think "formCharCode()" will work here.

I've ventured a bit into general search terms on how to utilize these stylistic sets, but I've only found CSS so far (font-feature-settings: "ss01") which doesn't work in AE.

I've tried creating a custom version of that font in which I've replaced the original Glyphs with the alternates, but that only seems to work in Illustrator, and legally is absolutely not an option.


Any other ideas maybe? 😅

They need to properly be marked as stylistic alternates in the font itself and fall within specifc OT glyph ranges. If the font hasn't that logic built in, AE can't detect it.

By @Mylenium

Since the font does have them marked properly as stylistic alternates, how where you thinking of handling them?


Best,
Finn