About Font Rendering And Anti-Alias Text - MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-LEARNING ACTIONSCRIPT 2.0 IN FLASH Manual

6.
Save your changes to the FLA file.
7.
Select Control > Test Movie to test your Flash document.
When you move the mouse pointer to the left half of the Stage, the font thickness
decreases. When you move the mouse pointer to the right half of the Stage, the font
thickness increases.
About sharing fonts
To use a font as a shared library item, you can create a font symbol in the Library panel, and
then assign the following attributes to the font symbol:
An identifier string
A URL where the document containing the font symbol will be posted
In this way, you can link to the font and use it in a Flash application without the font being
stored in the FLA file.

About font rendering and anti-alias text

Font rendering in Flash controls the way that your text appears in a SWF file; that is, how it is
rendered (or drawn) at runtime. The advanced font rendering technology used in Flash Player
8, called FlashType. FlashType uses advanced rendering technology to help make text appear
legible and clear at small to regular font sizes, such as when you apply advanced anti-aliasing
to your text fields. This technology is discussed in more detail later in this section.
Anti-aliasing lets you smooth text so that the edges of characters displayed onscreen look less
jagged, which can be particularly helpful when you want to display text using small text sizes.
The Anti-Alias option for text makes characters more legible by aligning text outlines along
pixel boundaries, and is particularly effective for more clearly rendering small font sizes.You
can apply anti-aliasing for each text field in your application, rather than for individual
characters.
Anti-aliasing is supported for static, dynamic, and input text if the user has Flash Player 7 or
later. It is supported only for static text if the user has an earlier version of Flash Player.
Advanced anti-aliasing options are available for Flash Player 8.
Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8 include a significantly improved font rasterization and
rendering technology, called FlashType, for working with anti-aliased fonts. Flash 8 includes
five font rendering methods, which are available only when you publish SWF files for Flash
Player 8. If you are publishing files for use with Flash Player 7 or earlier versions, only the
Anti-Alias for Animation option is available for use with your text fields.
406 Working with Text and Strings