Adobe - Flash Quick Starts: Embedding fonts

Embedding fonts

When you specify a font for a TextField in your application, Flash Player looks for a device font (a font that resides on the user’s computer) with the same name. If it doesn’t find that font on the user’s system, or if the user has a slightly different version of a font with that name, the text display could look very different from what you intended.

To make sure the user sees exactly the right font, you can embed that font in your application’s SWF file. Embedded fonts have a number of benefits:

* Embedded font characters are anti-aliased, making their edges appear smoother, especially for larger text.
* You can rotate text that uses embedded fonts.
* Embedded font text can be made transparent or semitransparent.
* You can use the kerning CSS style with embedded fonts.
* You can embed almost any font you have installed on your system, including TrueType fonts and Type 1 Postscript fonts.

The main limitation to using embedded fonts is that embedded fonts increase the file size or download size of your application.

There are many ways to embed fonts in a Flash application, including the following:

* Setting the font and style properties of a dynamic or input TextField on the Stage and clicking the Embed button.
* Creating and referencing a font symbol, which we’ll discuss in this article.
* Creating and using a run-time shared library containing embedded font symbols, an advanced workflow we won’t discuss here.