Quotation Marks and Apostrophes not displaying in the font style in AE
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Is there a fix to allow the AE text layer to use the special characters in the chosen font?
For example: in google sheets I have
Author, “The Greatest Story”
Templater reads it correctly but the quotation marks (“) are not displayed in the font assigned to the layer. Commas work correctly but (') & (”) do not. Is there some sort of special characters I need to enter into the cell to get AE to read it correctly?
Thanks
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You can see the differences here.
1st img is directly from Google Sheet entry to Templater
2nd img is a Manual Edit using the (")…what it should look like
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After some experimentation, I think I’ve figured out what’s happening here. I believe that the problem is that not all quotation marks are read the same way. After Effects seems as if it will dynamically replace any basic quotation marks: " with the more dynamic open and closed quotes: “” as necessary when text is input directly. When text is read from a data source, AE doesn’t appear to be able to figure out which quotation marks should be open and which should be closed. Given all of that, I’ve found a couple of solutions that might work.
First, you could replace the quotes in the data source with specific open and closed quotes, ie: “ and ” instead of ". I did some testing, and if specific open and closed quotes are used, they should be imported into Templater in the way you’ve described.
The other option would be a bit more complex but could work better, depending on how the project data is handled. After Effects has a find and replace Expression that you can apply to a layer that looks a little something like this:
text.sourceText.replace(/<text to be replaced>/,"<text to replace>")If you wanted, you could swap out the quotation marks in your data source with characters representing the open and closed quotation marks and then replace them using this Expression above. The only catch with this method is that you’ll need to use two different characters, one to represent the open quotes and one to represent closed ones. I used greater than and less than signs in my testing to represent the open and closed quotes. So, for example, let’s say your data source looked like this: <RICH, AND FAMOUS>. You could apply this Expression:
text.sourceText.replace(/</,"“").replace(/>/,"”")to the layer reading that data, and it should replace the greater and less than signs with open and closed quotes.
NOTE: The Unicode formatting on our forums may make this Expression difficult to read, but the text after the first comma is regular quote, open quote, regular quote, and regular quote, closed quote, regular quote after the second comma.
Hopefully, that makes sense, but if you have any other questions, just let us know, and we’ll take it from there.
Thanks!
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@jeff THank you so much - I took the open/closed quotations route and it works fine. Appreciate it!
-Joe
