Fonts in Flash....

#1

I’ve been pulling my hair out over this for a while now. I’ve done my research (incl. searches in this forum)to find that Flash, as an animation program, is designed to render each frame as quickly as it can. To do this its anti-aliasing is aimed more at speed than quality. Myself and a couple of work collegues have been over various options to try to combat this but so far can’t get the results we’d like. The company I work for creates educational Cd-roms for schools so crisp, legible text is a must. We’re constrained to certain fonts and screen resolutions (800x600) yet even at 16pt our text looks naff. So I turned to pixel fonts, which at a small size look rather good, but at larger font sizes these tend to look pixellated and just not very professional. I’ve also tried dynamic text and alised text in Flash and setting it to sit on exact pixels but it’s the same pixellated look.
I’m now wondering if there are any alternatives to pixel fonts. I’m even considering trying out bitmap fonts to see if that would get me anywhere, but so far I can’t seem to find a bitmap font editor for the PC? Can anyone help?
Another alternative that my work colleague came across was to use CSS to create the text. This looks far superior to normal flash text but we can’t get it to reference a font that is added to the library - only one that is installed on the end users machine. This makes CSS useless for our needs due to cash for end-user licenses (do these even exist).
Can anyone offer their suggestions as to how I can get clearer text in Flash. I’m fully aware that the font plays a role but, as I said at the top of this post, we are constrained to certain fonts due to the educational side of our work. Or am I just going against what the flash player is capable of?

ta,
jbw

#2

I use this tool called PixFont which turns any font and SIZE into a pixel font.
You can also generate bitmaps of fonts!

it’s a legit site eventhough it’s russian. I recommend this highly:
http://www.kgroup.ru/products.html

Also, it’s important to read this document:
http://www.miniml.com/fonts/guide.pdf

If you have questions, leave them here.

#3

Thanks for the reply DangerAhead. I’ll give this program a go but I’m trying to get better quality anti-aliasing on text. I’m going to get back to using CSS and see if I can sort this using that method. If anyone has got round poor anti-aliasing in Flash with CSS, and knows how to refererence embedded fonts then could you please offer me some help. :bowdown:

ta,
jbw

#4

Ok…so it’s 2:00 in the morning and I was about to go to bed…but…

In Flash mx + use any pixel typeface that is said to work in flash. I use GC Channel F Standard. HOOG055 (? is that right?) Will work as well as a few others from http://dafont.com. Put the pixeltype on your stage. Go into your properties window and make sure that the typeface isn’t sitting on half of a pixel.

WHAT? HALF A PIXEL ? THAT DOESN’T EXIST!

Exactly…that’s why a swf will not display the type correctly. Sometimes Flash itself, (fla) won’t even display the type right before you publish it.

So in the properties window make sure that for the X & Y properties, it’s sitting on something like 79.0 and 80.0 Instead of 69.8 or 79.6.

Hope that helps.

#5

To get crips fonts, just don’t embed the font. Obvisously if you are using a font that is not installed on the PC, Flash would use a substitute font, so just make sure the font you’re using is installed on the PC your Flash is running under.

#6

Thanks for the suggestion but I haven’t really got a choice here. The fonts need embedding cos our end user needs to see the same font we do. Providing the font with our CD-roms so it could be installed on the end-users PC would probably bankrupt the company due to font licenses.

ta,
jbw

#7

I think I fixed your problem, I replied to your post last night but since I’m a noob here my post is still being moderated. Sorry.

#8

Okay. download my example:
http://www.citizenparanoid.com/www.citizenparanoid.com/tutorials/textBoxCss.zip

  1. in flash open your library CTRL+L

  2. on the upper right corner there’s a popout menu - click it.

  3. select New FONT.

  4. Pick the font you want to embed. Change the “Name:” section to be IDENTICAL to the Font Section.

  5. In your CSS sheet, if you want to use the embedded font, use the exact naming convention you just saw in the dialogue box.

First, I recommend using imported CSS files instead of those made directly in Flash. Here’s a CSS I import to flash:


p {
color: #000000;
font-family: "standard 07_55"; // notice this is the font I've embedded in my flash file
font-size: 8px;
display: inline;
}
a:link{
color: #006699;
text-decoration: underline;
}
.mainBody {
color: #000000;
font-family: "standard 09_55"; // also a font I've embedded in my flash file.
font-size: 8px;
display: block;
}
.teaserTitle {
color: #006699;
text-decoration: underline;
font-weight: normal;
font-family: "header 17_67"; // also a miniml font I've embedded in my flash file.
font-size: 8px;
display: inline;
line-height: normal;
letter-spacing: normal;
}
.title {
color: #000000;
font-weight: normal;
font-family: "header 17_67";
font-size: 8px;
display: inline;
line-height: normal;
letter-spacing: normal;
}
.smalltitle {
color: #000000;
font-weight: normal;
font-family: "standard 09_55";
font-size: 8px;
 
}
.byline {
color: #333333;
font-family: "standard 07_55";
font-size: 8px;
display: inline;
}

Then your embedded font will show up in your text fields.

#9

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