Thai character accent marks misplaced

Report · Sep 29, 2023

Hello! Been working to see if I can find a workaround for my misaligned Thai accent mark characters. I am using a previously working font Arial MS Unicode for Thai in After Effects. I am using lastest version 23.6 on Windows 11.

I've been scouring the Adobe forums/web for a solution. I used to be able to fix this issue in years past with the "Text Engine" option set to ‘South Asian and Middle Eastern’ as noted here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/text-engine-missing-from-my-after-effects-t...

And I saw there that there is a new Univeral Text Engine feature that automatically detects your language:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/whats-new/2022-1.html
Which is great but for some reason, when I add in new text for Thai from another program like Word, the accent characters I compare with an overlayed MP4 video to a past video are much lower. The Word Doc opened in this screenshot is correct on the right.

I have some AE files made in years past that do NOT have new text being added. And they strangely seem to be ok as well? Not sure what is difference is between the none-working version above and working verison in AE as seen below:

Here are its font settings:

However, not sure if they matter. I have no idea what's going on as nothing like reseting the Paragraph or Characters menus, changing Optics to Metrics, nor adding/removing Ligatures seems to help.

Any suggestions would me much appreciated!

Report · Oct 16, 2023

Hi.

New After Effects Text Layers use the Universal Text Engine, which I think is what you are seeing here on 24.0

Old(er) After Effects Text Layers may use the "South Asian and Middle Eastern", which is what I you are seeing here in your older Projects.

The composers are different and consequently their layout decisions can differ as well and you've apparently found one - is you issue that the current composition is different or do you consider it incorrect?

We do not provide a backward access to the "South Asian and Middle Eastern" composer so unfortunately you are stuck with the new layout behavior with new Text Layers.

With 24.1 Beta we integrated an update to the Universal Text Engine and perhaps it did something desired with this layout. You might try it out if you can and let me know what happens.

Douglas Waterfall

After Effects Engineering

Report · Oct 17, 2023

Thanks Douglas for the behind-the-scenes information. I am still on version 23 (specifically 23.6 currently) and I have not installed AE version 24.0 yet as our IT team requests us to pause big new installs like these for a period of time. However, when we get the greenlight, I'll work to see if it has resolved these Thai font issues. Maybe a fix in the 24.1 release.

To answer your question ".. is you issue that the current composition is different or do you consider it incorrect?"
Any new text layers/alterations with Thai "diacritic" characters as show above are incorrect. Thusly can be hard/impossible to read to native speaskers so I have been told by our translator. However, any past text boxes in AE seems to have kept their correct diacritic character placements.

To help reveal some of our process, we've been moving all our old Adobe Animate animation files customly into AE for any new rebranding projects like these as our team has evolved to using AE more often. We do this by aligning content in AE layer-by-layer to match an MP4 reference underneight an onion-skinning version of the this Animate video.

So, we did find a weird solution that works because of this Animate source file conversion process. Though it is pretty tideous. I've managed to export out an SVG of the text from Animate and import that into Illustrator as a alterable source file. From there, we then import this into AE. It's not easy so we hope to see if the 24.1+ updates can avoid so many steps but it does produce an editable text file that we can then update for possible future work in AE for these files. We probably could keep just the SVG format if AE would accept this file type but adding it to Illustrator gives us more flexibility.

Anyways, for now we have a good 1-to-1 conversion solution native to our particular workflow. If you have any questions or updates on the "South Asian and Middle Eastern", we'd be happy to learn more on them. We peridoical transations in Thai annually. Thanks!

Report · May 17, 2024

Can you install the latest version of After Effects and see if the issue persists?

Let us know. I am moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for now.

Thanks,

Nishu