The other day I was working on a quick prelim Flash web layout for one of our clients and was disgusted to note (not for the first time!) that if I wanted the crispness and convenience of using a device font, I would not be able to fade said font using the _alpha property.
In case you don’t know why you’d want to use a device font, see Adobe’s knowledgebase:
“Using device fonts results in a smaller movie size, since font data is not included in the file. Device fonts are often a good choice for displaying text at small point sizes, as anti-aliased text can be blurry at small sizes… Device fonts are a good choice for large blocks of text, such as scrolling text.”
Whatever your reason may be for not wanting to use an embedded font to achieve the fade effect, here is a possible solution…
If you are fortunate enough to have a solid background colour behind the text, why not just make your text change to that color (and back again) using the tint property plus a motion tween? Alternatively, if you want to do it in code… well, don’t forget that there isn’t a _tint property as there is an _alpha one; you’ll need to use something like this little snippet by Senocular to do the trick in code. Either way, the principle’s the same; if the background color is uniform, you can simply fade to that color rather than using the somewhat more finnicky alpha property. It may even be worthwhile to change your design slightly in order to accomodate this effect.
In fact, there is a great article over at connectedpixel.com that will clarify much on the embedding of fonts and problems therewith, such as how the _alpha property works for different types of text, how font embedding is shared between all text fields (static and dynamic), and much more.
This an article off the old Visual Harmonics site which got a few hits on Google, I thought I’d put it up here in case anyone people are still asking this question.
