Flash CS3 Documentation

Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Adobe Flash > Working with Text and Strings > About font rendering and anti-alias text

About font rendering and anti-alias text

Font rendering in Flash controls the way that your text appears in a SWF file; that is, how it is rendered (or drawn) at runtime. The advanced font rendering technology used in Flash Player 8 and later is called advanced anti-aliasing. Advanced anti-aliasing uses advanced rendering technology to help make text appear legible and clear at small to regular font sizes, such as when you apply advanced anti-aliasing to your text fields. This technology is discussed in more detail later in this section.

Advanced anti-aliasing lets you smooth text so that the edges of characters displayed onscreen look less jagged, which can be particularly helpful when you want to display text using small text sizes. The Anti-Alias option for text makes characters more legible by aligning text outlines along pixel boundaries, and is particularly effective for more clearly rendering small font sizes.You can apply advanced anti-aliasing for each text field in your application, rather than for individual characters.

Advanced anti-aliasing is supported for static, dynamic, and input text if the user has Flash Player 7 or later. It is supported only for static text if the user has an earlier version of Flash Player. Advanced anti-aliasing options are available for Flash Player 8 and later.

Flash includes a significantly improved font rasterization and rendering technology, called advanced anti-aliasing, for working with anti-aliased fonts. Flash includes five font rendering methods, which are available only when you publish SWF files for Flash Player 8 and later. If you are publishing files for use with Flash Player 7 or earlier versions, only the Anti-Alias for Animation option is available for use with your text fields.

Advanced anti-aliasing is a high-quality font rendering technology that you can enable by using either the Flash authoring tool or ActionScript. The advanced anti-aliasing technology lets you render font faces with high-quality output at small sizes, with more control. You can apply advanced anti-aliasing to embedded font rendering for static, dynamic, and input text fields. The improved capabilities mean that embedded text appears at the same level of quality as device text, and fonts appear the same on different platforms.

The font rendering methods available for Flash Player 8 and later are Device Fonts, Bitmap Text (no anti-alias), Anti-Alias for Animation, Anti-Alias for Readability, and Custom Anti-Alias, which lets you define a custom value for thickness and sharpness. For more information on these options, see Font rendering options in Flash.

Advanced and custom anti-alias features support the following:

• Scaled and rotated text
• All fonts (plain, bold, or italic) up to 255 pt size
• File exporting to most formats (such as JPEG or GIF files)

Advanced and custom anti-alias features do not support the following:

• Flash Player 7 or earlier
• Skewed or flipped text
• Printing
• File exporting to the PNG file format

  NOTE

  When text is animated, the player turns off advanced anti-alias to improve the appearance of your text while it's moving. After the animation is complete, anti-alias is turned back on.

For a sample source file, aliasing.fla, that shows how to apply and manipulate anti-aliased text in an application, see the Flash Sample page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_samples. Download and decompress the Samples zip file and navigate to the ActionScript 2.0/Advanced Anti-Aliasing folder to access this sample. You use the advanced anti-aliasing technology to create small text that's highly legible. This sample also demonstrates how text fields can scroll quickly and smoothly when you use the cacheAsBitmap property.

Flash CS3