A typical challenge faced by Flash developers like me is grasping 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 nice when dealing with large type but it causes small writing 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 taking it right could take several tries.

More recently with the advent of Flash MX 2004 came the alias writing option but, more importantly the TextField.StyleSheet() class. What is the TexFiled.StyleSheet() class? Ill get to that but first let me tell you about this new alias writing feature. The latter hides the anti-aliasing to build small text sharper and more legible yada, yada, yada. However, most almost always 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 do not already know something about CSS dont fret the small stuff. Get to your most approved 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 might 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 understanding to some text. Not only will you have more crisp and legible fonts but more importantly, this mean you may 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 dont 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 measure ; furnishing that the client was happy with the changes youd might get lucky and only need to run around that track once.

In my line of work I convert pre-constructed web sites (web templates) into a unique Internet project (web sites), in other words I work with pre-made internet site 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 identical . Utilizing style sheets with my Flash templates enables me to keep my production measure at a minimum and ultimately the measure I save will benefit my clients. For detail direction 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 constructed so that every part of every character falls exactly on the monitors pixel. Pixel fonts are incredible at grasping fonts at small sizes looking crisp and legible at any resolution. If you are wondering if Pixel fonts would display correctly on the finish users 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 data is sent.

Nevertheless if you want to utilize fonts that look crisp even at small sizes without the make use of of CSS, Pixel fonts are right for you. To buy and or read more about Pixel fonts checkout these internet site 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 may do without a lot of unnecessary frustration going with CSS when working on larger projects.