package { import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.text.Font; import flash.text.TextField; import flash.text.TextFieldAutoSize; import flash.text.TextFormat; public class ch17ex14 extends Sprite { public function ch17ex14() { var tf:TextField = new TextField(); tf.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT; addChild(tf); var fonts:Array = Font.enumerateFonts(true); var found:Boolean = false; for each (var font:Font in fonts) { if (font.fontName.match(/^comic\b/i) != null) { tf.defaultTextFormat = new TextFormat(font.fontName, 14); tf.text = "Don t you love this font, " + font.fontName + " !"; found = true; break; } } if (!found) { tf.defaultTextFormat = new TextFormat("_typewriter"); tf.text = "Lucky you, no Comic Sans!"; } } } }

The second kind of font is an embedded font. The outlines of all (or a subset of) the glyphs in the font is available to Flash Player because the font has been embedded in the SWF at compile time, or it s been loaded at runtime. Either way, Flash Player can use its own text engine to render text in the font exactly as intended. There are lots of bene ts to using embedded fonts. Most importantly, you

can be sure that text renders as you want in that font, on every computer. Beyond that, you may also enable anti-aliasing and subpixel anti-aliasing for embedded fonts (see more about anti-aliasing in the later section Anti-aliasing ), giving you lots of control over the smoothness of text using these fonts. Finally, there are some quirky limitations on what you can do with device fonts. A few of these were mentioned in Introducing TextFields earlier in the chapter.

These limitations are also dependent on Flash Player version. In Flash Player 9, device text could not be rotated, scaled non-uniformly, or faded with alpha. It could be masked if it were cached into a bitmap rst. Using Flash Player 10, device fonts are rendered with OS-provided anti-aliasing, and can be faded with alpha. As of Flash Player 10.1, device text still cannot be rotated with rotation, however it may be rotated with rotationZ, since this caches the text to a bitmap before transformation. However, using the new Flash Text Engine, covered in 18, Advanced Text Layout, device text can be rotated. The takeaway is this: if you need to animate a TextField, its fonts should be embedded.

The main drawback of embedded fonts is their size. Embedding the outlines of a whole font adds some weight to your compiled SWF size. Thankfully, the world is becoming so broadband that few people will complain over 50kb of fonts being added to the download size, so this is only an issue in special cases like banners, where you really have to watch lesize carefully. Also thankfully, all the font embedding methods allow you to choose subsets of the font to embed, saving some space. Beginning in Flash Player 10, embedded fonts come in two avors. The old format, and the Compact Font Format or CFF. CFF fonts are designed for use in the Flash Text Engine; they won t work in a TextField. So, I ll shelve them until next chapter when I get really deep with text rendering.

Fonts in Flash Player are represented by flash.text.Font objects. Furthermore, the Font class is used to manage these fonts. In the previous example, you saw how to retrieve all available fonts using the static method Font .enumerateFonts(). Pass it true to include all device fonts; omit this parameter or use false to include only embedded fonts. This method returns an array of Font instances. Each Font instance has three essential properties.

fontName The name of the font. This is the string you will use in CSS rules, <font> tags, and the font property of TextFormats. fontStyle The style of this font. Bold, italic, and bold+italic versions of the font must be

embedded independently if you are to use any text in that font and style. All these embedded fonts will be instances of Font with the same fontName but different fontStyles. This property is one of the constants FontStyle.REGULAR, FontStyle.BOLD, FontStyle.ITALIC, or FontStyle.BOLD_ITALIC.

fontType Whether the font is a device font, an embedded font, or a embedded CFF font. These values are de ned as constants in FontType.

But the most important duty of Font is to register new fonts. If you load a SWF with an embedded font, you ll need to do this step before you can use the font in TextFields. Once the embedded font is registered with Font, it can be referenced by font name by TextFormats and the like. Use the static method Font.registerFont() to enable a font for use by passing its Class reference.