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Working with Text and Fonts
Flash Lite renders anti-aliased text using vector representations of font outlines. If you want
anti-aliased text to appear as smooth as possible, you should set the player’s rendering quality
to high. Rendering quality affects all vector content on the screen, not just anti-aliased text.
The following figures show an anti-aliased text field (Arial, 24 point) rendered at high,
medium, and low qualities:
To maximize animation performance and frame rate—for example, during an intensive
animation or tween sequence—you can temporarily set the rendering quality to a lower
setting and return it to the previous setting after the animation has completed.
Embedding font outlines in SWF files
To render a text field’s font, Flash Lite can either use fonts that are available on the device or
use font outlines that are embedded in the published SWF file (for more information, see
“Font rendering methods in Flash Lite” on page 38
). Embedding font outlines in the SWF
file ensures that the text field’s font appears the same on all target platforms, but results in
larger file size. Flash Lite requires font outlines to render either bitmap (no anti-alias) or anti-
aliased text.
For static text fields that use the anti-alias or bitmap font rendering methods, Flash
automatically embeds the font outlines required to display the text field’s contents. For
example, if a static text field contains the word
Submit
, Flash automatically embeds the font
outlines required to display those six characters (that is,
S
,
u
,
b
,
m
,
i
, and
t
). Because the
contents of a static text field can’t change, the SWF file need only include fonts outlines for
those specific characters.
For dynamic and input text fields that use the anti-alias or bitmap font rendering methods,
you must specify the characters whose font outlines you want to embed in the published SWF
file. The contents of those types of text fields can change during playback; consequently, Flash
can’t assume which font outlines need to be available. You can include font outlines for all
characters in the selected font, a range of characters, or specific characters. You use the
Character Embedding dialog box to specify which characters you want to embed in the
published SWF file.
