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Home::CSS

CSS in Flash the return of crisp and legible fonts.

Author : David Collado

A typical challenge faced by Flash developers like me is
getting fonts to look like you want then to. For any project
choosing the right font face and size is a process that requires
both you and ultimately the client to see eye to eye.

In Flash MX and earlier versions fonts were by default
anti-aliased, meaning that the edges of the text are smoothed.
This is good when dealing with large type but it causes small
text to appear blurry. Earlier versions of Flash also had other
issues. For instance if one were to realign textfields around
other objects fonts might come out of focus (because of
positioning), and getting it right could take several tries.

More recently with the advent of Flash MX 2004 came the “alias
text” option but, more importantly the TextField.StyleSheet()
class. What is the TexFiled.StyleSheet() class? I’ll get to that
but first let me tell you about this new “alias text” feature.
The latter hides the anti-aliasing to make small text sharper
and more legible yada, yada, yada. However, most often than not,
fonts appear overly pixilated and cracked. In my opinion “alias
text “ is nothing more than a little ransom note generator
making every character appear as if it had been cut out of a
magazine. Adding insult to injury if you are publishing for the
Flash 6 player or earlier versions on Flash MX 2004 the “alias
text” feature does not work on dynamic and or input textfields.

Moving forward with stylesheets. If you don’t already know
something about CSS don’t fret the small stuff. Get to your
favorite search engine and key in CSS (short for Cascading Style
Sheets), and in seconds flat you will find hundreds of articles
on CSS benefits, syntax, usage and whatnots. Very quickly, CSS
is the language of style on the web and as opposed to other
languages CSS is much easier to read and write. One of the
reasons for this is you can pretty much read everything just as
you would plain English, another is the ability to write
everything in lowercase, something you could never getaway with
in JavaScript.

CSS in ActionScript is relatively simple. The first thing we
want to do is open the Action panel and create an empty style
sheet object. Basically the idea is to load our style sheet
information in there (font size, weigh, color etc.), and then
assign that information to some text. Not only will you have
more crisp and legible fonts but more importantly, this mean you
can change details about your font in an entire Flash site by
simply editing one file. Pretty powerful stuff huh? Very handy
when clients decided they don’t like red anymore or call to tell
you that the font is too small. In the past such changes could
be very time consuming, requiring developers to go through the
whole movie editing textfield after texfield one at a time;
providing that the client was happy with the changes you’d might
get lucky and only need to run around that track once.

In my line of work I convert pre-designed web sites (web
templates) into a unique Internet project (web sites), in other
words I work with pre-made website templates. The whole basis
for using a website template is to develop fast and high-quality
website in half the time that it would normally take a regular
design studio to do the same. Utilizing style sheets with my
Flash templates enables me to keep my production time at a
minimum and ultimately the time I save will benefit my clients.
For detail instruction on how to create a style sheet object in
Flash MX 2004 simply open the help panel and search under the
keywords “cascading style sheets”. In all fairness I must
mention something about Pixel fonts. Pixel what? Pixel fonts are
fonts specially designed so that every part of every character
falls exactly on the monitor’s pixel. Pixel fonts are incredible
at getting fonts at small sizes looking crisp and legible at any
resolution. If you are wondering if Pixel fonts would display
correctly on the end user’s computer or some other platforms
that does not have these fonts already installed. The answer is
yes, but Pixel fonts must be embedded to ensure they are
displayed correctly on every computer. The downside here is that
embedding these fonts means an increase in file size which in
turn causes an increase in bandwidth needless to say bandwidth
determines the rate at which information is sent.

Nevertheless if you want to use fonts that look crisp even at
small sizes without the use of CSS, Pixel fonts are right for
you. To buy and or read more about Pixel fonts checkout these
website www.FontsForFlash.com and www.ductype.com.

In sum the choice is your, on smaller projects I would actually
prefer Pixel fonts over cascading style sheets, I mean why bring
a gun to the snipe hunt when all you need is my gunnysack. On
the other hand you can do without a lot of unnecessary
frustration going with CSS when working on larger projects.

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CSS in Flash the return of crisp and legible fonts.

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