RTL support (right to left languages) is not completed, Hebrew (and possibly other MENA) issues
Here are the issues ranked from the most severe to an inconvenience:
- Range selector animation does not work properly for Hebrew Text: the animation is reversed, for one line you could hack it with setting animation to "start" instead of "end" and reversing the keyframes. with 2 lines you are doomed.
- Highlighting/Selecting Text problems: this happens when you have combined text of Hebrew and English or Hebrew and numbers in the same layer or Hebrew with another Hebrew that has a change in size or weight. the situation get's worse when you move the layer, the selected area of the text is changing making it hard to select anything outside the Hebrew letters
Highlighting issues:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-vZuy2v6nK_ScuAm_I3WlI14951E3Qji/view?usp=drivesdk
Moving the text makes it worse:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YnDJQ5DeV1EGwiHHJIraeJf7tC-tExzU/view?usp=drivesdk
Wrong translation for "Sample" in the Font Preview:
the preview for Hebrew fonts is written "לטעום" which is a bad attempt to write something like "Sample" but in hebrew it means "to Sample" aka to taste something. it should be "דוגמה" which is "Sample" or "Example"
https://imgur.com/a/e492vUCAdobe Clean looks bad for Hebrew:
the letters stick to the top when on layers, and are pretty ugly in general :(
https://imgur.com/a/jIHmZFq
General Feedback: I really thing the MENA implementation in Ae should be seamless same as Ps and Ai. you should not have to choose between engines. many times you are combining both and I hope it's a temporary phase until the MENA engine will be stable. the current setup is not that bad because you can combine in the same project both of the engines, but have to change each time. restarting the software is not required which is a good thing. this way I could use MENA engine for things that work and not use it when things that do not work. hopefully in the end it will work for everything so I won't need to select it and simply enjoy typing freely in both languages.
Thanks!

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Douglas Waterfall commented
Hi. I have a solution for RTL Text Animation now deployed in Beta 22.3.0 (89).
Here is the forum writeup: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta-discussions/feature-focus-text-animator-support-for-bidirectional-text/td-p/12783326
It would be most helpful to me and the team to ensure we get it right for those experienced in RTL workflows to try it out and help us understand what I missed.
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Elad Etzion commented
Please fix it, thank you!
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Ariel Brener commented
Adobe you left the entire RTL users no option - now that the Latin text hack is canceled - RTL users will be forced to stay in previous versions without the ability to upgrade until you fix this.
this is ridiculous.
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Andrew Bien commented
22.1.1 Update... Absolutely Ridiculous..
After a couple of years of not fixing the RTL problems you got us an update which "surprisingly" made things worse...
Why do you have a beta program if your not letting us check those features? -
Roei Tzoref commented
Hi, please note that the december 2021 update (version 22.1.1) with the new Universal Text engine DID NOT FIX the text animators issue, so text animators still work left to right, with right to left text. and what's worse is that in the new update - there's no way around that anymore (no latin text hack to write left to right with animators left to right)
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ido katsiri commented
Please help us use your product better and fix it
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ammar diemss commented
please fix this problem
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Doru Catana commented
As many more said, text animator works left to right regardless of the type engine selected. What is worse is that if you want to add any expression to range selector, the expression counts the characters in the correct manner. So the expression counts from right and the range animator counts from left. It's ok for a one-line text, you can split("").reverse().join(""), but it's impossible for multiple line text to find out what index a word has so you can add the animator only to that word. As an easy test, create a fill color text animator. Select a color. Add this as expression selector:
txt = text.sourceText.split("");
if(txt[textIndex-1] == "ط") 100
else 0This should highlight all the ط characters. It does nothing even close to that.
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ali jaber commented
Besides those bugs all justify options in the paragraph panel (justify last left, justify last right...) don't work properly with Arabic text, any option of those will hide one or more lines from the end of the text arbitrary,
My workaround is to add more lines that I don't need until all the lines of my original text reappear. -
Taha Moussa commented
when animating Arabic text (or any RTL) the range selector works from LTR, if I reverse the animation it works for single line text, but with multiple lines the animation works from bottom to top
This should be resolved
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Shaul Firon commented
A MAJOR issue for me too. I'm just starting with AE, the combination of RTL and this convoluted interface is a night mare for a beginner!!!
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Yair Katznelson commented
Corona times just made me understand & learn that there are other software I can use instead of adobe. Most of them are more modernized & reliable.
A bug known to adobe for already 3 years & no one responds.
This is my last year with creative cloud, I'm not gonna renew my subsciption. -
Gurpritam Kaur commented
I want to translate my English text which is already animated into Hebrew and I switched on the option of RTL (middle eastern Lang) in AE CC but I am still facing issues. When I copy paste the Hebrew text on already animated text it flips but when I create a new text layer and copy paste it then it comes out proper. I don't understand why is it happening and I have multiple layers and reanimating the layers is painstaking. If anyone has a solution regarding this please help. Thanks!
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Kaitlyn Higgins commented
Has anyone found a work around for animating text in Hebrew? When I export with Lottie Bodymovin my text ends up flipped (letters are backwards!), right alignment is ignored and the entire text block is moved to the left considerably.
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Yair Katznelson commented
CC 2020 and still RTL languages bug with combining numbers or english letters,
Why add a feature if you can't support & fix it?? -
Eitam commented
fix it I'm a paying Customer
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Anonymous commented
Adding my vote and hope to fix RTL issues! It's about time for direction equality! Thanks Adobe!
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Eran Stern commented
I add my voice (also) here as well.
If there's a need, I'll be glad to show you guys what's not working in a private session -
Noam Segev commented
we suffer for too long! come on adobe!
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Guy breitman commented
Please fix the Hebrew supporting.