Shared Font Hell
Despite all the wonderful advancements of Flash MX, there are still a number of old, buggy behaviors that have plagued developers for years. I used to create Flash movies with shared content, namely symbols, movie clips, and fonts that were "shared" by multiple movies with the supposed plus being reduced file size and consolidation of assets. None of it works quite right (or as it should), especially shared fonts.
Branden Hall did some digging to find out what the problem was, and arrived at this unfortunate answer:
...the shared font will only work in dynamic and input textfields properly in Internet Explorer on the PC platform. Also, the shared font won't work at all on any platform with the TextFormat object.
Branden does provide a rather wonky workaround to force shared fonts to work under Netscape / Mozilla under Windows and Mac OS X, which is great. But chances are most developers will never read Branden's article, or take the time to implement his workaround, and the buggy behavior will continue to plague the application. Ugh.
Comments
That's not the only font problem with MX. I have found that it won't bold TrueType fonts or Postscript fonts without an official bold version on my Mac/OS 9.1 system. Of course, the only copy I have of my logotype font is a TrueType plain version. Do you have better luck using OS X?
Posted by: Lauri at July 8, 2002 12:35 PM
