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Shared Fonts Manager for flash aplications

Shared Fonts Manager enables the loading of font libraries into Flash movies, was released recently.

Brajeshwar: What new possibilities does SFM bring to creating Flash projects and its development?
Iv: With the help of SFM, you can fundamentally change the work with embedded fonts in Flash. It is now possible to create a single font library on a site and load necessary fonts via a program on an as needed basis.

Brajeshwar: However, you can create a single font library by using shared libraries. What is the difference?
Iv: Shared libraries come with a couple of considerable inconveniences, which often restrain developers:
- the placement of shared assets into a Flash movie during the developing process makes it impossible to work with them via a program
- the halt of animation during loading of a Flash movie
- the inability to use loaded shared assets in other loaded movies

I tried to solve these problems in developing my project. It is now possible to:
- load any font with a loadMovie command at any time
- monitor the loading process with the help of a preloader
- receive an acknowledgement upon a successful loading of a font
- format text fields with property html=false; using the setTextFormat method
- install the embedFonts=true; property into text fields with property html=true; upon which the loaded fonts will be applied

Brajeshwar: How can SFM be used in practice?
Iv: In the first place, I think, the product would be really useful in multilingual projects, when a Flash movie can be told the location of necessary texts and from which libraries to acquire fonts.
Secondly, it can, quite sufficiently, simplify the localization of flash movies. The work with hieroglyphs plays a special interest. Europeans neglect to think about the fact that a Chinese or a Japanese font can be often larger than one MB. In this situation, a specific library could be created for the most commonly used hieroglyphs, while each of the rest could be allocated a library of its own and thus be loaded as it becomes necessary.
A new possibility of creating projects in which a client can format text for a Flash movie with the help of HTML and without limiting himself to turned-on fonts only now arises.
The font map property method allows dynamic designation of necessary library lists. All that’s left is the loading and application of necessary fonts.

Brajeshwar: Do you offer any sort of discounts to web developers?
Iv: I think that web developers should not pay for the SFM and was able to insist upon this. The full version of the product is available to them for free without any obligation. This also applies to companies that do web design, when the fee is applicable only to their clients. And still, the price of $15 for licensing of one domain is not burdensome even to the not-so-rich companies.

Brajeshwar: Thanks for such detailed answers and your valuable time.
Iv: Thank you for such good questions.

Last Modified : April 23, 2004 / 1:36 PM
Filed under : Reviews
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Here’s the Russian version of this interview: http://www.flash-ripper.com/archives/000576.htm or simply http://www.flash-ripper.com/

What is the Font Manager component and what is it for.

Here are two cases when using the SFM component is preferred:

• If you have decided to use shared fonts libraries in your project or
• If you have decided to refuse using the shared fonts libraries due to their inconvenience.

Hmm... What are shared font libraries and why do I need them?
- Usually sites use styles. It means that the same fonts and pictures set and stylesheet are used, so the site is easily recognized by any of its page. It is hard to imagine the developer who is using, e.g., different stylesheets on each HTML page or who is using the groups of ten similar pictures with different names for each HTML page. This, fortunately, does not occur in most cases, and some objects are used through the whole site, giving the advantages of browser caching that greatly reduces the traffic.

But for some strange reason Flash became an exception in font issues. If you want to use embedded fonts placed outside of the movie, the only way to use the external file containing fonts is to create a shared library and place the shared movieclip on stage. Sounds great. But not so beautiful in practice. Here's a whole list of the tasks which are not so simple to complete:

• Shared library can be loaded in two ways: before the first frame if library is included in exported movieclip (not good!) or during playing the movie timeline and this is not desired because movie will be paused before playing the frame containing shared library until this library will be loaded.
• And what about dynamically detecting, loading and applying the needed font? Including all fonts used for site in each movie makes no sense! I have been trying to distribute movieclips containing shared fonts on the frames at the end of a timeline and have been trying to go to the corresponding frame to load the desired library, and I have found, e.g., if we jump to the fifth font, the first four fonts start loading too. Nice.
• And what if you need to switch the movie language on the fly? No problem with loading new texts. But how to apply the new font? - No way. You need to load a new movie.

These problems mentioned above (and many other like it) in using shared libraries have brought me the closest to researching the Flash possibilities in this direction.
So the Font Manager component was born.
What are the benefits of the Font Manager?
- The ability to use a shared font library through the whole movie. If any movieclip, main timeline or movie loaded into it has a shared library containing font, then this font can be used in any movieclip (and with loaded movies too) with a help of the Font Manager Component.

It means freedom. Freedom to load movies containing a shared font library at any time and to use the font contained in this library anywhere you need.

This movie has no embedded font or any shared library.
Shared Library data is described in an external XML file.
You can choose any font from a list, load and apply it to the selected text.
Just select the text to format, then click "apply" button. If you have selected no text, then the whole textfield will be formatted.
The "Embed fonts" button is to demonstrate the text appearance in embedded/no embedded fonts modes.
Source files are located here: demo_main.zip

This is a 5 Kilobyte movie.
Library movies are 121 Kilobytes.
I don't like sites which load extra kilobytes for no reason. But this is the way a flash developer has to go if he needs to use different fonts. If you haven't played with this example, then 121 Kilobytes isn't loaded to your machine. The Triviality? But the face of the site is formed by trivialities.

And one more thing: once loaded, libraries will be placed in a visitor's browser cache and will be taken from cache if your movie needs it again. And such 121 kilobytes of data spared on each page are megabytes for visitor and are gigabytes for server.
 

If someone desires to translate one or more pages of this site to their native language to assist developers in using the SFM component, it would be greatly appreciated! Simply right-click on the page, click view source and save an opened text file in appropriate location. Then translate it, leaving HTML-formatting without any changes.
Before you begin translation, contact me, because page that you have chosen for translation may be in progress now.
Also, please reference your data and link to your site at the top of the page, where translator anchor is placed.
It is not needed to translate the everything at once. I'll be adding pages as they arrive and will indicate the presence of different language versions in the headline of the page.
Help page translation is preferred.

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