Pasting in special glyphs does not work?

[mart-martinlofqvist]

Hi! 

I'm trying to insert a special Ö character from my open type font into After Effects. I am aware that After Effects does not have any built in open type features but I'm trying to copy a character from InDesign/Illustrator/Photoshop to paste into After Effects but no luck. 

Is this not possible?! 

[dfred23]

Just curious, which font are you using and which OpenType features did you activate?  You can upload the .ai and I can take a look. I'm not too familiar with OpenType, but according to an Adobe employee you can copy and paste from Illustrator but two OpenType features are stripped.  Unfortunately, they didn't mention which ones. So, you might want to play around with removing features to see which ones don't copy over.  I also read that copying OpenType from Illustrator works better than InDesign.

Unfortunately, if the character isn't copying over properly you might have to Create Outlines and copy/paste the manual way . Or Create Outlines and use Overlord.

[mart-martinlofqvist]

I'm using Gravity by ABC Dinamo: https://abcdinamo.com/typefaces/gravity

The open type feature I'm looking for is the alternate Ö character, which does not seem to copy over to After Effects how ever I try. 

Of course I could go completely manual and convert this to a vector shape but I'm using the text effectos and I want to export this as a .mogrt template....

[dfred23]

I didn't have a problem copying and pasting any characters from that font:

[MyerPj]

So you're good to go?

Did you use the Character Map?

[mart-martinlofqvist]

macOS does not seem to have the Character Map... so frustrating... 

is this not possible on a mac?

[dfred23]

Have you tried this?
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/enter-characters-with-accent-marks-on-mac-mh27474/mac

[MyerPj]

Try this google search, there seems to be some ways to do it...

Google Search: windows character map mac equivalent 

[Warren Heaton]

Open Type fonts are supported in After Effects.  Are you thinking of Variable Fonts?

While the macOS option to press and hold a key to display a pop-up menu with alternate characters does not work while actively entering text in an After Effects Text Layer, it does work when renaming a Layer or a Comp (or in any text field).  So, to get "ö", you could press and hold "o" while renaming a Layer to enter the "ö" and then copy and paste that to the text of a Text Layer.   It's a round-about way to do it, but it works without leaving After Effects.

Or, if a character does not come across via copy and paste as expected from Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or TextEdit, you can save a Photoshop document with the corresponding Text Layers with specal characters, import that as a Composition, and then convert that to editbale text.

Another approach is to use the macOS Accesiblity Keyboard.
 

[mister.eno]

Hello friends –

I tried a bunch of techinques for this so far. I'm not a typographer, but it looks like there are levels of complexity for special characters. I can use the Glyphs panel in AI to copy and paste single-character glyphs into AE, like ž, etc.

The glyphs I'm trying to use are two-letter cominations, not ligatures strictly, but "nested" pairs (see screen grab). Font Book gives me a little more info (see other screenshot) but I'm still not quite getting it…

ARE they techincally ligatures, or some other thing?

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

[MyerPj]

In Windows you can use the Character Map, and copy a  character to be placed in a text layer:

[mart-martinlofqvist]

An update to this: 

it seems as if you are using any Expression to control the text (for example repeat() or adding strings together) After Effects does not use the special symbols you have pasted in. 

That's why I did not get this to work. 

Might be something for the AE team to add to the bug list... 

[MyerPj]

Hmmm... I'm getting this to work:

[mart-martinlofqvist]

Try to use a typeface with alternative glyphs. Ö is just fine (I'm swedish so I use åäö frequenlty). But what I am looking for is typefaces that has several versions of the same glyph, only accessible through Open Type features in Illustrator/Indesign/Photoshop. 

[mart-martinlofqvist]

Attention someone from the After Effects product team. 

Is there really no way to honour special open type glyphs* when handling text in After Effects via Expression? Published through a Mogrt and used in Premiere... 

*I'm not looking to handle ÅÄÖ, that's basic for a swede like me, but I'm looking for alternative open type glyphs as the square punctuation in ABC Dinamos Gravity