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CSS in Flash the return of crisp and legible fonts.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
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