Replacing a missing font

[Dan Jacobsen]

Hi folks,

If I open an After Effects project produced elsewhere and there are missing fonts, how can I select a font to use instead of the missing one?

Particularly in the the situation where I have the font used but perhaps mine has a slightly different name so I'd like to just say 'use this instead please'

Thanks

[Dave Merchant · Accepted solution]

It's not easy without a plugin. After Effects will happily show you that a font is missing via the project panel, but it just assumes that you will deal with the problem by installing it. To replace the font applied to a text layer you have to select that layer, so if the layers in question are scattered about in precomps it becomes a nightmare to find them all.

There's a paid plugin which can search-and-replace lots of things to do with text layers, including fonts - https://aescripts.com/pt_textedit/ - but note that After Effects has a terrible set of tools for scripting text objects, and it cannot cope with situations where a different font or weight is applied to parts of the text. Whatever is used on the first character is assumed to be used on the entire layer, so if you bolded a word or inserted a symbol you'll have to fix it by hand.

[Dan Jacobsen]

Ah good to know though.

I felt like it must be possible and I was being thick for missing the option 🙂

At least I can say with surity that's the case.

Thanks for the help 🙂

[Todd_Morgan]

Awesome plugin!!

[Liran Tabib]

I encountered that also, it happens with multiple installations of the same font or moving a project from machine to machine (mainly Mac to PC)

I suggest finding the fonts replicas in your OS or as mentioned, using a script like FontMate

[Andrii Bogachenko]

Maybe that`s not yourt particular case, but sometimes opening some project some comp has a missing font, and to find the location to fix manually - there is a default option, throught the Search in "Project" panel

- https://helpx.adobe.com/mt/after-effects/how-to/find-missing-footage-fonts-aftereffects.html

[scrozier · Accepted solution]

@jenkmeister I think it's about time to bring AE up to parity with other Adobe Apps when it comes to finding / replacing missing fonts. You still have to go through comp by comp to replace fonts instead of a global project font replace. I was sort of shocked that it still requires a paid script for this functionality which exits in almost every other Adobe app. Whenever there is a slight font naming change it causes such a headache.