I've been hankering to try Flash Player 10's new anti-alias support for device fonts, and finally got around to it today. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get it to work from Flex.
I've compiled a simple test app with both Flex SDK 3.3 and the preview of Gumbo 4.0.0.4904 both targetted for Flash Player 10 (as per the instructions here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Targeting+Flash+Player+\ 10 <http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Targeting+Flash+Player\ +10> ) and got identical results for both. Anti-aliasing embedded fonts works as normal, but device fonts appear with their normal blockiness. I've tried on XP, Vista and Windows 7 with FF and IE all with the latest FP 10 install. With Windows native ClearType enabled, the device fonts look a little better (as the OS is doing the anti-aliasing) but still nowhere near as good as the embedded font. With Windows ClearType disabled, the device fonts look as blocky as ever and the embedded font looks grea. I'm really interested to see if anyone else has tried this. A test app (with View Source enabled) is here: http://dev.nx.sg/lab/flex3fp10/LongTextTest.html <http://dev.nx.sg/lab/flex3fp10/LongTextTest.html> To try it out, make sure you have Flash Player 10 installed and: 1. If on Windows, turn off ClearType to prevent Windows from doing any anti-aliasing for you and confusing the issue (via Control Panel -> Display) 2. Open the link above and choose a sans-serif device font from the dropdown list (if you have Myriad Pro installed locally - choose it) and size the font around 10pt to see the difference clearly. 3. Compare the first and second blocks of text. Both are in the device font selected but the first has fonAntiAliasType=advanced and the second doesn't. You'll see that they are identical in all respects. 3. Compare the first two blocks to the third block which is the embedded font - the anti-aliasing is clearly present on the third block and absent from the others (or of less quality on the others if you have ClearType still enabled) 4. Just to prove that the app is targetted correctly to Flash Player 10, click on each block of text and watch it rotate in 3D space. As an aside, note that after rotating, the device fonts become anti-aliased but VERY badly, and inconsistently across the width of the text. Anyone else played with this? I'd really like to get it working so that I can go back to using deving fonts for my applications... Thanks, Toby.
