copy&pasting Hebrew into AE

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

Here’s my experience.

I’m doing a project which needs versions created for something like 27 different languages. Most of the animations are in AE, but some are in Maya and Shake. Recently I did the Japanese and Arabic graphics.

Japanese was pretty easy. I had a PDF file from the translator where I could simply copy and paste characters. Since I had the Japanese fonts in my computer, they pasted right in and I did a visual check to make sure the characters were right. Of course the translator will look at them later to make sure I haven’t missed something.

Anyway, this is how we did the Chinese graphics some time ago and that went well.

Arabic, on the other hand did not go so smoothly. I was told that I could simply use Ariel and the Arabic from the PDF would paste in just fine. But, at least to my eye, the characters did not look right. I may have needed to look for an Arabic version of the Ariel font, but that had not occurred to me at the time.

What I ended up doing was zooming into the text on the PDF file, doing a screen capture of the image of the text, placing that into an Illustrator file and using the trace feature to create outlines of the text. I saved these and imported them as artwork into AE and Maya and Photoshop as needed. Of course I cannot edit the text without going back and redoing the whole screen grab, illustrator to vector art process, but it does get the job done.

As for Hebrew text, I have four fonts available to me in OS-X. They are Arial Hebrew, Corsiva Hebrew, New Peninim MT and Raanana. I’m not entirely sure where these came from. They may be part of the OS-X installation or may have come with the Adobe products. Anyway, I did a quick test, searching for Hebrew in Google. This comes up with some text which can be copied and pasted into AE. The result I am seeing is that the characters are running in the opposite direction (left to right) from how they run displayed on the web browser.

Not being able to read any of this, I don’t know which is correct. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who can shed some light on this issue. Wikipedia might have some helpful information. Anyway, if someone can explain how to get the characters to reverse direction, that would be quite useful.

Lars

[Bob Hazen]

Dave, thanks for the PDF suggestion, it did output the characters as outlined text into Illustrator. The numerals didn’t come across but just went back in and corrected them, much easier than typing the Hebrew. I lost the ability to use some of the text animations from the original project but made some adjustments and worked out fine.

Thanks again
Bob Hazen
Triangle Productions
Grand Rapids, MI

[Steve Moller]

We have a project that is much the same but for Polish text, Basic text in AE works fine but as soon as we put it into Path Text we lose the special characters associated with the language. It must be done in Path Text because we need to track the text. Just wondering if you managed to sort out the problem you had?

Cheers

[Touko Maksimainen]

Well, once you get around the font hurdle you’re likely to find yourself in the same situation as I am. The type looks fine but they are in the wrong order. Arabic and Hebrew are read backwards, from right to left and AE is pasting them in the other way around. Anyone have an idea how to get that right?

[Alan Bezet]

It is called Text Reverser and it is specifically designed to reverse text, so that Right to Left languages display correctly in after effects.

It can be bought at: https://aescripts.com/textreverser/

. It’s $5.00, so it is definitely worth buying simply to experiment with.

For Arabic/Hebrew and other right to left languages.

Alan Bezet
Production Manager
Washington, D.C.
alan.bezet@gmail.com

[Touko Maksimainen]

While your suggested solution will work for Hebrew, it won’t work for Arabic for two reasons.

One, assuming it’s made with AE Expressions, which can’t handle unicode characters as inputs (or outputs).

Two, Arabic uses a complex systems of ligatures which will break upon simple text reversal, rendering the result practically unreadable.

Anyway, there is a free Hebrew reversal tool at https://www.modernketubah.com/article_reverse_hebrew.php to help you out.

Adobe also sells a special Middle Eastern edition of Creative Suite, but only as a stand-alone edition. Regular CS can’t be upgraded to such standard. There is hardly any point of paying for your product twice just to get this functionality?

[Alan Bezet]

We have to translate graphics that we did for a client into Arabic. Is there ANY way to do this with After Effects with out purchasing the Middle East edition? I have tried almost every thing, but no matter how I try to copy and paste, the only thing that seems to work would be to take a screen shot and convert the text in Illustrator to something I could use in AE.

It currently shows up like with as separate broken characters when I try to paste it in.

Thanks,
Alan

Alan Bezet
Production Manager
Washington, D.C.
alan.bezet@gmail.com

[Touko Maksimainen]

Sorry, but it seems like the only easy way is to get the Middle Eastern edition. Otherwise your only options are limited to various tedious work-around such as the one you just described.

I’ve also tried exporting as vector pdf from Word but it didn’t work out. Don’t remember why anymore though.

[Alan Bezet]

The one other thing that I found that might work is called ArPix Pro. Check it out here-https://grapheast.com/ge-software/cp.php?id=99

-Alan

Alan Bezet
Production Manager
Washington, D.C.
alan.bezet@gmail.com

[Majid Al-aydeross]

Not sure if you guys ended up reaching to a solution that worked out in ease. Anyway, for whoever ends up in this page, their is a simple free solution if your editing suite has internet.

Just copy/paste your text into
https://convert.wajihah.com/
and convert

copy/paste the result to AE. Works with me on CS3 & CS4, haven’t tried earlier versions.

If you don’t have an internet connection, Grapheast’s software or Al-Rassam software should do the same trick (though I didn’t try these, just heard about them)