copy&pasting Hebrew into AE

[Alan Bezet]

Hey All,

We have successfully used GraphEasts product to do an entire 14 minute video, that had over 50 Arabic titles. We were running AE CS4 on a Mac(snow leopard 2008 MBP). It worked really well. The only issue was that the translators graphics list was a .doc and I had to open it in Pages to get it to copy correctly.

The program costs $99.00 and comes with 30 fonts. It seems to work in most Adobe programs. I found it as a suggestion on Arabic Mac speakers forums. It used to be free and then I guess GraphEast bought it and essentially is licensing it now. You can copy large chunks of Arabic using this tool and don’t need internet access to do so.

You can find this software at https://grapheast.com/ge-software/cp.php?id=99. But if you need an urgent solution, contact them as early as possible. The company that sells it is in Dubai, and thus they are quite a few hours off where we are in the U.S. EST. You have to e-mail their sales people and ask to purchase it, they don’t have an automated purchase and download system.

Hope that this helps!

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

[John Shoemaker]

The same website that created a script for text reversal, has since released an After Effects script for Arabic Text specifically.

https://aescripts.com/arabictext/

The regular text reversal did not work for the reasons stated above, but this script actually places the characters in the correct order.

The workflow is a little goofy. For example, if you want to split the text into several lines for a paragraph you kind of have to work backwards through the text. (eg. Hit return X times for your line breaks and then move the ‘end’ of your Arabic text up to the top line.) The program, AE, still operates left to right so editing the text requires some backwards thinking.

However, the end result is fully editable Arabic Text. You can use any font and any text animations. Although, keep in mind that the text animations will animate the lines backwards, from left to right, and I’m not sure what different fonts will do to the characters (“Do they need the serifs or not?”)

The thing about working with graphics in different languages is that having more control can be a dangerous thing. As designers, we want to style the text in a certain way, but the truth is that we don’t know what we’re doing to the meanings of the letters or words so we have to be careful.

John Shoemaker
Backflip Film Productions LLC
http://www.backflipfilms.com