Cant select last letter in a line of text - After Effects v 22.1.x and v22.x

[defaultq4sh6gisdyl8]

Hello, I have an issue in AE where if I click and drag on a line of text it wont let me select the last letter, this happens if I click and drag left, or right. I have no idea what is causing this.

I thought it was the GPU - I have an Zotac RTX3080 I swapped it out for an RTX 3070 and am still having the same issue. I uninstalled AE Juice as that seems to cause random problems with AE now, and am struggling to figure out what may be causing this.

I have a Core i9 10920x an Asus Rog X299E mother board, 64gb of Ram DDR 3600 (XMP is on) and the Zotac RTX 3080 - I have updated graphics drivers and still no luck.

I was running two 4K monitors, and have unplugged on thinking that maybe that was an issue, but no luck.

Please help. I am losing my mind with this problem.

[Artur24099353d20g]

Still the isue. very anoying 

[Lee Garcia]

Please solve this bug, is really annoying...Still there today!

[MatijaHNTV]

Photoshop is getting worse by every update.

My workaround this bug is I put the cursor in the text and hit CTRL+A to select the entire text...or...if I need to select an entire word (like the last word in the sentence where I can't select the last character), I put the cursor where I want to start selecting then I press and hold SHIFT and use the right arrow key to select the word character by character. Annoying, but it works.

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Just a quick note from me, busy working on a fix and trying hard to not make it worse - it is a painful break for you folks and a lot of work on my side and I would really rather not go through all this again either.

Text hit testing and selection are insanely complicated topics and it is super easy to break something else as an unintended side effect of what seems like an obviously easy fix - which is what evidently happened in this case.

One has to be being extremel careful and test as many edge cases as can be imagined and as it happens along the way I found two unreported separate obscure failures as well, one seems quite rare the other less so. Mixed LTR/RTL selection actually got better imho.

Anyway, I had hoped to have a complete solution in Beta by today but it was not to be. So, still soon.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[jesmo71]

Douglas,

Thank you for the response. I'm sure everyone is glad to see this is being dealt with, and we all await your update as soon as possible.

[HUP-GFX]

Thanks man, this is VERY much appreciated!  I get that this must not be an easy thing to work out and just want you to know that you'll make a lot of people very happy if you solve this glitch.  Your efforts are not unappreciated!!

[Tony Zed]

I had the problem in 22.3, it was fixed in 22.4, then when I updated to 22.5 the problem is back again. With all the client work I have, and just can't afford to mess with it so I just rolled back to 22.4 and am not going to update again until 22.6 comes out. What drives me f**king mad though is that every single time I turn on my computer for the last like 2-3 months I get a notification "Adobe After Effects has an available update" and I look and it's still 22.5. So it's like I'm reminded every single day. Having a broken version of After Effects shoved in my face has become part of my computers startup ritual. Fingers crossed 22.6 will have the issues resolved. I generally love all my adobe products, but this does really make me feel like we're all paying good money to be a bunch of beta testers for adobe.

[Douglas_Waterfall]

This particular problem will NOT be fixed in 22.6 - it will be available in Beta first.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[jesmo71]

*Head exploding*.  Why on earth would you release another version of AE without first fixing a fundemental operation?  This is a fundamental operation for almost all apps on the planet, not even something that is special in AE. How is this not a priority? To be completely honest, everyday operation is far more important than adding some new features.  New feautres do us no good if we can't use the program efficiently because of poor basic programming. This is incredibly frustrating to know this was not prioritized.

[Heathenlamb]

This is massively frustrating. Can you PLEASE jsut release the fix for it TODAY. It is causing issues for my output daily

[Artur24099353d20g]

Adobe can you stop folowing your marketing team calendar? Most of us needs stabilty of existing functions rather then new fancy shiny not working "gadgets" 

why again you want release build with bugs? postpone... noone will die from it

(exept maybe few heartatacks in marketing team but thats revelant) 

[RonPaul2016]

This bug is so anoying...

AE is WAY to buggy for the amount of $$$ they charge....can't wait for an alternative to take it's place....and not charge monthly for it! 

[karen5C5C]

Same problem here.  I have a big project with lots of specialty formatting.  This is adding a ton of time.  NOT acceptable.  

[Douglas_Waterfall]

I finally have a fix for this in today's BETA - version 23.0.0.25 which is available through the Creative Cloud Beta Apps.

Bugs like these are terribly frustrating to experience as well as scary to fix because they have such a high potential of breaking in another unexpected way with a different arrangements of text. There are just so many possibilities.

I have tested it with all the cases I could come up with and even more obscure ones I expect nobody will encounter so I am feeling cautiously optimistic that this particular problem can be put to bed (I actually thought this last week but then tried one more thing...)

We need your help to validate that my optimism is well founded - if you are able to use the Beta in your particular workflow please do so and let us know what text selection situations fail for you, if any.

If we hear good reports from Beta users, and we do not find any failures ourselves then we will see this change promoted to the Fall official release.

Regrets that it has taken this long for me to sort it out.

Douglas Waterfall
After Effects Engineering

[Douglas_Waterfall]

I finally have a fix for this in today's BETA - version 23.0.0.25 which is available through the Creative Cloud Beta Apps.

Bugs like these are terribly frustrating to experience as well as scary to fix because they have such a high potential of breaking in another unexpected way with a different arrangements of text. There are just so many possibilities.

I have tested it with all the cases I could come up with and even more obscure ones I expect nobody will encounter so I am feeling cautiously optimistic that this particular problem can be put to bed (I actually thought this last week but then tried one more thing...)

We need your help to validate that my optimism is well founded - if you are able to use the Beta in your particular workflow please do so and let us know what text selection situations fail for you, if any.

If we hear good reports from Beta users, and we do not find any failures ourselves then we will see this change promoted to the Fall official release.

Regrets that it has taken this long for me to sort it out.

Douglas Waterfall
After Effects Engineering

[jamesm46355552]

Hi Doug, 

im not a beta user, but really appreciate what you've done. Thanks! 

[Flame2bits]

We are having this issue too.... I dont wanna install a beta version...

[HUP-GFX]

 okie dokie! I'm going in!!!

[Thomas5C27]

Adobe After Effects 22.5 This issue is still rampant and on top of that, sometimes the text will randomly apply different font styles to different parts of the text. I was using Myriad Pro, one of the standard typefaces. But yeah, the last letter/number of all text boxes still don't include the last letter.Yes you can shift move to get the last letter, but it's a befuddling problem that STILL hasn't been fixed. Double clicking can select all, but if you wanted to individually treat the text, it's very frustrating to have to feel like you're using an freemium old text editor instead of a very expensive software package.

[Douglas_Waterfall]

This is a little vague: text will randomly apply different font styles to different parts of the text

Can you give me any more information? A screen shot or even better the unicode text that you have in your layer would be a great start.

The only valid reason for font styles to change "behind the scenes" is if the unicode character you are trying to use is not supported by the selected font. So for example if you paste Japanese text into a paragraph styled Helvetica we're going to switch the font for the new range of Japanese text. Is your behavior something like that?

The reason Apps do this is because otherwise we would have to show a missing glyph box and that is deemed unfriendly because how do you know how to fix it? What would be a compatible font? Fonts are tricky (and annoying) for engineers to handle.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[Thomas5C27]

It happened a few days ago, I cancelled the fonts and went back to basic and it seemed to fix the issue. Though the issue with selecting the final line of text is still present even with the newest version released 22.6 After Effects. Really should be fixed, as text is a big part of visual stimuli in terms of information, and to be befuddled within such a robust program is quite frustrating, especially since it wasn't always an issue. To not be able to select individual lines of text, which often is what I need to select. Select all (shift+a) won't work, double clicking usually ALSO selects the 'return' space, so you end up having to shift-arrow key, but not often does it work, since double clicking doesn't automatically make the cursor at the end of the line. Thanks for quick response.

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Uh oh,  now what do you mean "cancelled the fonts and went back to basic?" That is not quite enough information for me to get started on what happened to you.

As for selection, see my above post - a proposed fix for it is in Beta 23.0.0.25, not 22.6 release - please give it a try if you are able to run Beta in your workflow. If we get a good response, it will be promoted to the fall release.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[jesmo71]

I've had this same exact problem recently. Different characters in a text line will show a font that is not the font that is selected. The font will still show the style selected for the line, but if you select individual characters, while the font may be "Bebas Neue", it will show "Myriad Pro" in the Font Selection portion of the Character tab.

[Douglas_Waterfall]

Yes, I have seen that too in the UI but not had a chance to chase down what it is confused about.

My last best guess, without looking into seriously, was that it is somehow a "mixed" selection problem where instead of showing a blank font name like other Apps are wont to do, it instead shows the global/app level default font - the one that get used when you create a new Text Layer.

I found it very confusing and unsettling while testing my own changes because I thought the text was composing incorrectly. It seems to behave correctly if you cursor through it, but a selection range seems to be wrong sometimes - but not always. There is probably a clue there.

Thanks for pointing this out, you have encouraged me to file a bug on this and chase it down since it was not just me.

Any other weird Text behavior like this? Point it out.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

[TheAdPlain]

Same issue here! Pleaae fix.