The fonts replacement behavior for unsupported characters

Falrinth

Would be awesome if Templater after replicating multiple variations, upon encountering ones that forces AE to default font due to unsupported language/characters, would revert the “master” composition font settings to what it were originally.
Right now, if we get any text value unspported by originally set font, we have to go through entire master composition to revert it back to custom font, if we would like to replicate again, or do similar chore, even if we make backups without templater effect enabled. Still a chore, that could be eliminated.

Jeff

@falrinth

It’s an interesting idea! I’m not sure if it would be 100% workable, since Adobe’s handling of text layers can be a bit odd, but we can certainly consider the request. In the meantime, there is a technique we’ve used in the past that might help with this particular scenario.

Basically, we could use an After Effects Expression to change the font according to a text value specified in the Data Source. To accomplish this, we’d want to start by creating a new text layer and connecting it to Templater. Once that’s done and we can verify the font name is being loaded, we can then apply this Expression:

text.sourceText.style.setFont(comp("Globals").layer("Font01").text.sourceText);

to the “Source Text” value of any text layer whose font we wanted to change. We’d need to change "Globals" to the comp that contains the layer and "Font01" to the layer name, but once that’s done, AE should read the font name from the Data Source and adjust any text layers accordingly.

We’ve also used this technique to pre-emptively keep After Effects from reverting to the default font by proactively swapping over to one that can support the characters in question so that no error occurs during the render/replication process.

The only catch to this method is that the font name in the Data Source must match AE’s listing exactly, or the font will be unable to load. The easiest way to locate the exact font name is to create a new text layer, expand the “Source Text” section, and click the small “play” button next to the pickwhip. This should bring up a menu. Navigate to Text>Font and choose the font you want to use. That should populate the text layer with the exact name of the font/style that After Effects uses.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any other questions, please feel free to run them by us.

Thanks!