Discuss the considerations for embedding fonts that will be used in editable text regions.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Although most computer users have a wide variety of fonts installed on their systems, discrepancies do occur and can cause problems with the look of your Flash movie. If you use a specific font in a Flash project, publish the Flash movie, and then view the Flash movie on another computer, it might not look the same if the other computer does not have those fonts installed. In that case, the second computer will substitute a default font, which can affect the spacing or the look and feel of your Flash movie. To prevent this problem, you should embed your fonts.

To embed fonts means to incorporate the fonts used in a Flash project in the project itself. The font becomes part of the Flash project, so when the published file is viewed on different computers, the fonts are available.

Flash automatically embeds some of the fonts; characters that are used in a noneditable text box are automatically embedded by Flash. However, in situations where your project includes a default message in an editable text box, only the specific characters included in the default message are embedded automatically. A user who views the published movie and types his or her own message might type characters that were not in the original default message, and thus were not embedded. Having some font characters that are embedded and some that are not can lead to undesirable results when the published movie is viewed, such as squares or other strange characters appearing in place of the desired characters.

Flash lets you embed extra characters — in addition to those automatically embedded — so that users can display all letters, numbers, and/or punctuation from a specific font. Font embedding preferences are set using the Font Embedding dialog box, which is launched from the Embed button in the Character area on the Properties panel.

Embedding fonts increases the size of the published file, so you only should embed additional characters when your movie includes editable text.