R – Flash: Antialiasing characters on dynamic textfields without embedding fonts, in japanese

antialiasingflashfontsinternationalizationtextfield

I'm trying to achieve antialiasing on dynamic textfields in flash on a Japanese site. The content of these textfields is not fixed data.

I don't have the option to embed the fonts, since embeddeding all characters will result in a very heavy swf file(3000kb+ just for the fonts). This is due to the fact that there's a large number of unique characters in japanese(literally thousands).

Basically, any flash site using dynamic textfields faces the same choice:

keep the filesize down and use
only Device Fonts (without
antialiasing)
force a 3mb+ font download to the user
to display smooth antialiased fonts.

I've asked around to some japanese friends, and they said "Shoganai!" (translation: "can't be helped"). Anybody have ideas?

ps: unfortunately, silverlight is not an option either.

Best Answer

Really dumb 'workaround', and I'm sure it'll get downvoted, but since flash.text.TextField inherits flash.display.DisplayObject, you can use the built-in filters such as flash.filters.Blur to blur the text by half a pixel horizontally and vertically.

This will consume a little more CPU.

EDIT: After working a little bit with CS4, I found ther perfect way to do it without the extra CPU overhead! The result will look 1:1 exactly like 'static text' render. I believe the same will work under CS3 as I recall a similar option.

While the text is selected, under properties, select 'Anti-alias' and select 'Custom Anti-alias'. Set the Thickness to 100 and the sharpness to 0. That did the trick for me!

Related Solutions

R – How to correctly display Japanese RTF Fonts

My guess is that changing font names in the RTF has probably made things worse. If a font specified in the RTF is not a Unicode font, then surely the characters due to be rendered in that font will be encoded as Shift-JIS, not as Unicode. And then so will the other characters in the text. So treating the whole thing as Unicode, or appending Unicode text, will cause the corruption you see. You need to establish whether RTF you import is encoded Shift-JIS or Unicode, and also whether the machine you are running on (and therefore D2009 default input format) is Japanese or not. In Japan, if a text file has no Unicode BOM it would usually be Shift-JIS (but not always).

Embedded fonts in flash with the same fontName property

Thanks, i think your right about that.

I did however find a way of embedding the font and setting the name.

First of all I used CrossFont to convert the Type 1 postscript font to an .otf

Using the [embed()] feature now available in cs4, I was able to use the fontFamily attribute to set the fontName property of the embedded font.

In the code below you can see I set the name to "BlaaDeeBlaa" and the TextFormat will accept it and display the embedded font.

[Embed(source="assets/FontFileName.otf",
                            fontFamily="BlaaDeeBlaa",
                            mimeType="application/x-font")]
var BlaaDeeBlaa:Class;

var CH:Font = new BlaaDeeBlaa();

var testTxt:TextField =  new TextField();
testTxt.defaultTextFormat = new TextFormat("BlaaDeeBlaa",28,0x000000,true);
testTxt.embedFonts = true;
testTxt.text = Font.enumerateFonts(false)[0].fontName;
testTxt.autoSize = "left";
addChild(testTxt);

n.b. Only OpenType(.OTF) and Truetype (.TTF) can be embedded using this method

I was put onto this technique by Lee Brimelows' tutorial at gotoandlearn

Best Answer

Related Solutions

R – How to correctly display Japanese RTF Fonts

Embedded fonts in flash with the same fontName property

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