Missing fonts and right-to-left titles in Video by Zaweba

Type causes more quiet trouble in video projects than most people expect. A project made on one computer opens on another and half the titles have fallen back to a plain default font. A title in Arabic comes out with its letters in the wrong order and not joined up. A small heading scaled up for a zoom turns soft and blurry. Video by Zaweba handles all three, and it helps to know how.

When a font goes missing

Fonts live on the computer, not inside the project. If you build titles with a font that isn't installed on the machine where you later open the project, the app can't draw them as designed. Video by Zaweba tells you straight away: opening a project names the fonts that are missing.

To fix it, go to File > Replace fonts. It lists every font the project uses, with the missing ones first so they're impossible to overlook, and lets you choose a replacement for each. Pick the nearest match you have, or install the original font and reopen the project.

It's worth checking this list before you export anything that's going out to an audience, even on your own machine. It's also a quick way to see how many different fonts have crept into a project. If the list is long, that's often a sign the titles need tidying with text styles.

Arabic and Hebrew titles

Right-to-left scripts need special handling. Arabic letters change shape depending on their neighbours and join together, and both Arabic and Hebrew read from right to left. Titles in Video by Zaweba lay these out properly, right to left with joined letters, so a name or a phrase in either script appears as a native reader would expect.

That opens up real jobs: a bilingual title card for a community event, a wedding video with names in Hebrew, an educational video with Arabic headings. Type the text as you normally would and the layout follows the script.

Do ask a fluent reader to check the finished titles. The app gets the layout right, but only a reader can confirm the wording and spelling are what was intended, and a font that lacks the right characters will still let you down.

Titles that stay sharp when enlarged

Titles and shapes in Video by Zaweba are not just pictures stretched to fit. When a clip is enlarged, they're redrawn on a bigger canvas, up to four times the size, so edges stay crisp instead of blurring. That matters when you animate a slow push-in on a title, or scale a small label up to fill more of the frame.

It's a good reason to make titles as titles rather than importing them as flat images from elsewhere. An imported picture of text will soften when scaled; a title made in the app keeps its edges.

Good habits with type

Stick to a small set of fonts across a project, ideally linked through text styles, so swapping one font later is a single change. Keep fonts you use for a series installed on every machine you edit on. And when you hand a project to someone else, mention which fonts it needs, so the missing fonts list doesn't come as a surprise on their screen.

With those habits in place, the replace fonts list in Video by Zaweba becomes a safety net you rarely need rather than a regular rescue job.