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Flash's font hell 1 - introduction

In the last weeks I was working on a web app for a big company making sun blinds. One of the objectives was to make it highly customisable and prepare multilanguage usage in future.

To meet all goals I planed to load all parameters and texts from a xml file. On top of that(to give the customer a bit more than he requested, what is a good practice in my opinion) I decided to fill all textfields with the htmlText property, this gives the customer the possibility to use the textfield's html capabilities. I never did this before in this way, so I didn't know what was awaiting me :-)

Firstly everything was working fine(the text was taken from the xml structure and fontfaces were controlled by html tags.), but then I tried to use the embedded font of the CI.

From this time on the whole project was frustrating me for several days. I am sure you know what I am talking about. It's hell to use embedded fonts in flash. I was searching the web and I just found other people asking how this is working and showing there not working source codes.

Finally after nearly a week everything was working as I wanted, but to get there I had to try every combination of commands in as3 with all embedding techniques of flash to see what's working or not and how it works. It was a hard piece of work and this problem decreased my hourly rate of this project a lot. But what really counts is I know now how it's working :-)

I decided to write in the Blog about it, in the hope it will safe you some time.

Introduction

To make flash using an embedded  font in a textfield we have to do some classifications of the way we want to reach our goal and what exactly we want the textfield to do.

Our problem will split into three parts:

1. We have to embed the font.
2. We have to find the internal font name.
3. We have to say a textfield to use an embeded font.

On top of the we have to seperate if we are using:

1. FlashIDE
2. flex, flexbuilder or flashbuilder, ...

And finally we have to seperate if we want to use

1. the text property.
   1. without fontfaces (just regular, bold or italic).
   2. with mixed fontfaces (bold, italic, ...).   
2. the htmlText property.

That’s it for today. In the next post we will see how we can embed a font into the swf file.