Rich Rodecker’s blog on flash, flex, actionscript, javascript, and php, with a dash of randomness
Embedding Bitmap Text in Flash CS3
Lost a few hours to this one today. I was trying to embed a font in a textfield with the antialising set to ‘Bitmap Text (no anti-alias)’. No matter what though, the font would not display in the text field when embedded. Turns out that internally flash actually renames the font, to ‘FontName_8pt_st’ (substite the 8 for whatever font size you embedded into the textfield). Not sure what the ‘_st’ part is but so far it seems constant, doesn’t ever change. I’m curious to know the reasoning behind this. Anyway, just remember to use the ‘updated’ font name instead of the normal font name, and you should be good.
about 1 year ago
It’s better to embed the font in your library. You do this by clicking on that little down arrow on your library panel. This brings up a massive menu with the option, ‘new font’. Select the font you want etc. Now, when you want to assign it to a text field, select the font name in the drop down, the embedded version should have a * behind it name. If you want to assign an embedded font you need to assign it a linkage Id. Right click the font in the library and select “Linkage” to do this.
about 1 year ago
I’m pretty sure “st” is short for “standard”. Try with bold/italic.
about 1 year ago
Luke – I always saw that the problem with embedding fonts in this way has always been that it will embed the entire font, which may include a huge range of characters that you more than likely never use. In some cases this may be ok…I wouldn’t doubt that most ‘bitmap’ fonts that were created with flash in mind don’t really have the full glyph set that a ‘regular’ font might have.
I haven’t tested this with bitmap fonts to see if it works any different than normal though.