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Count the number of glyphs in a text layer
Hi guys. I really hope someone can shed some light on this problem.
I am working with some RTL texts and I want to highlight words based on their position. I can count from end to start in order to reverse the animator but the thing is that JavaScript and after effects animator count the characters in a different way. So JavaScript .indexof() function does not count the characters in the same way that the animator range does.
Ex: if I use “لى” as text source, animator says it is 1 character while text.sourceText.length says it is 2. If I have one of two of this in my string, the whole thing works badly. Is there any way to either make the animator count this as 2 or make JS see it as one?
As a side information, I noticed that animator does the same thing for “fi” or other ligature in the fonts that have them. If your font has the “fi” ligature, AE counts it as one char.
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4 Replies
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There is no way for javascript to know. Javascript deals in strings, and lets the renderer decide how to display that (Ligatures or not, for example), So I think it’s the same as in the Browser: you can’t know.
I don’t know if it totally breaks legibility but is disabling ligatures an option ?
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Thanks for the answer Filip.
Disabling ligatures does not work for Arabic text. I think the only solution is to check the font and get all the “required” ligatures in an array and then subtract the number of occurrences of any of those ligature from the main text.
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I thought something similar, but where can you find the list of characters that will form a ligature for a given font?
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I cant remember exactly the name, but I found a forum post which gave some indications towards a light, free software that shows fonts “architecture”. All the glyphs, ligatures and such. I wish I didn’t close that tab 😀
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