Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie I review the technique of embedding font information into your SWF files or the alternative is to device fonts. Now, when you add static text to your movie as I've reviewed, by default Flash embeds font Outlines in the SWF file for each of the fonts that you're using. Flash automatically takes the font's description, all of those properties that I covered in the previous two movies, such as position and size, character, font family, style, size color, as well as paragraph settings and embeds that information into the exported movie. This capability to embed fonts makes Flash a great platform for using unusual fonts in movies because the end user doesn't have to have the same fonts installed on their computers to see the results as the designer had on his or her computer. To create the results, however, you need to install all fonts on your computer that you want to embed in the SWF file that Flash creates when you publish your movie. For example if you receive an FLA file from a friend or colleague that uses a font that you don't have installed on your computer, you'll get an error message when you open the FLA file from Flash informing you that a substitute font will be used in the place of this font that you don't have. So at this point you have two options. You can replace the font with a default placement. You'll want to click the Use Default Button or you can replace the font with a font that you've installed on your computer as an alternative. Now, the font may display properly in the Production File, that's the FLA file, yet falter when the movie is exported to the SWF file because the actual font to which the screen font refers to can not be found when the movie is published. So the rule of thumb here is make sure that you have on your computer all the fonts and font outlines that you want to use in your final, published project. And try not to move that FLA file around to different computers if you have unusual fonts that are probably not going to be found on that second computer. To check for potential problems, if you are moving your FLA files around, select from the Main Menu View, Preview Mode, Anti-Alias Text. This is already enabled by default. This will preview the text if it appears rough or jagged. This indicates that the text will not be exported when the SWF file is published. Essentially, let me zoom in here. Essentially this text will look like the following. You take your Property Inspector. Let me open this up a little bit, open up the Character Setting. Change the Anti-Alias Setting here to Bitmap Text. So in other words, if you've got this set for one of these Anti-Alias Settings; Animation, Readability or Custom and you still see this rough text here with no anti-aliasing, even though you have your View, Preview Mode, Anti-Aliasing Text Enabled, you should hopefully see the anti-aliasing. If you don't, that's an indication that you're going to have problems when publishing your file because this font outline is missing on your computer. Let me go ahead and double click on my Magnifying Glass, bring up my text to 100 percent there. Let me now talk a little bit about Device Fonts. Now, although all this information you're storing in your exported file about your fonts assures that they will display correctly, this also makes the final SWF file bigger. How much depends on the specific font. Now, if you want to keep your files sizes as small as possible and perhaps you're not using very special fonts, you're using very generic fonts, you probably want to use Device Fonts instead. Set your Text Box here to Use Device Fonts for the Anti-Alias Setting. Device Fonts are fonts that won't embed themselves in the SWF file. These are special fonts that will not be embedded in the exported movie and therefore will create an SWF file with the smaller file size. Flash Player displays this text using the closest match on the user's computer to the Device Font. Now, although this will reduce the file size since the font outlines are not embedded in the SWF file, they will also probably look different than the font you used in your FLA file and that you see in your SWF Player. To solve this problem, Flash includes three built-in Device Fonts to help produce results closer to what you'll expect. These are available under the Type Pull-Down Menu along with your other fonts. You'll find these here at the very top of the pull-down menu. Let's mov this scrollbar to the very top and let's move my Properties Inspector over here so we can see these. Click on the Text Field and then from the Family Drop-Down Menu choose one of these first three at the top; Sans, Serif or Typewriter. Sans is similar to Helvetica or Arial. Serif is similar to Times Roman and Typewriter is similar to Courier. And one last tip is Device Fonts can be sharper and more legible than exported font outlines at sizes below ten points. So often designers will use Device Fonts for their menu systems when you have very small menus or buttons with labels on them and you want those to be very sharp. Device Fonts is a good strategy since the typeface you're using or the fonts you're using on those menus or buttons are generally not very fancy and more often than not these will be Helvetica or Arial anyway. So this would be a good application of the Sans Device Font right there. That will then conclude this section of the tutorial on working with text. In this section we learned about Text Anti-Aliasing, the three text types; Static, Dynamic and Input Text. We learned how to Spell Check your documents. We've learned all about the various text options and attributes in the Properties Panel and you've learned about Embedded versus Device Fonts. Let's now move on to the next section of the tutorial; Working with Sound where you will learn how to import sound to the Library, how to compress sound, how to modify sound settings and how to edit sound within the Edit Envelope.