Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Bitmap Fonts in Flash

It’s 3:00AM and I just spent 2 hours fix­ing a bitmap font (pixel) to dis­play cor­rectly in my Flash movie. I even­tu­ally solved the prob­lem. Thank god, because I think I was going mad. Here’s what I did to avoid a few noto­ri­ous problems.

Prob­lem 1: Blurry Text

You got your nifty font all ready and sud­dendly Flash is not being nice and diplay­ing it all blurry. Yuck. It turns out that when a text field’s X and Y stage coor­di­nates are non-integer val­ues (for exam­ple X: 102.4 and Y: 301.3) the pix­els at the edge of the font suf­fer from over anti-aliasing. You can read more about it in a Flash Tech­Note. The solu­tion is pretty sim­ple: just change those nasty non-integer val­ues to nice inte­ger val­ues. This was some­what of a “duh” moment — when read­ing the Tech­Note I remem­bered this odd­ity (the doc­u­ment dates from 2001 for cry­ing out loud.) Addi­tion­ally Fonts For Flash has a use­ful user guide to help you make sure those bitmap fonts dis­play as crisp as they should (note: they carry a nice selec­tion of bitmap fonts for sale.) Good, time to move on.

Prob­lem 2: Filled Characters

My prob­lems were far from over. The first prob­lem was solved in a mere 5 min­utes. A lit­tle Google here and there and you’re ready to get going again. But then sud­dendly some char­ac­ters of my font filled them­selves where no fill was intended. Com­pare the two images below.

Now, obvi­ously sit­u­a­tion A totally sucks. Use­less. Before I go on I must add that this was a bitmap font I edited and changed myself using Macro­me­dia Fontog­ra­pher, an appli­ca­tion I’m not ter­ri­bly famil­iar with. I didn’t like some spe­cific let­ters. How­ever only “R” and “D” were giv­ing me trou­ble (i.e. fill­ing up) and I didn’t touch those — go fig­ure. Any­way, to be hon­est I had no clue what was going on. I redesigned both let­ters, but alas with­out sat­is­fac­tory result (I was doing some­thing wrong obvi­ously.) After doing some research I came across a tuto­r­ial at Ultrashock.com on this very sub­ject. I was saved. I cor­rectly edited the let­ters that were caus­ing the pain and it automag­i­cally all worked per­fectly as shown in sit­u­a­tion B.

Feel­ing Silly

I feel a bit silly for my lack of knowl­edge in this spe­cific case — it’s not like this is an extremely recent prob­lem or any­thing (more like known for ages.) I guess I never really used bitmap fonts much in Flash and if I did, I was a lazy bum and would import images (which is obvi­ously a big no-no con­sid­er­ing file size and dynamic text fields.) Any­way, I hope my igno­rance will help you with future projects and lead to less frus­tra­tion and time loss. I’m going to bed and dream about bitmap fonts in Flash and world dom­i­na­tion. Catch you later.

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Tuesday, July 6th, 2004.

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