Flash 8 Cookbook

7.16. Making Small Fonts Readable

Problem

You want to use a small point size for your text, but anti-aliasing makes the font unreadable.

Solution

Use device fonts or adjust the anti-aliasing settings for the text.

Discussion

Most fonts use anti-aliasing to ensure that the font doesn’t appear to have jagged or sharp edges. To achieve this effect, the font’s edges are actually blurred very slightly. Although that makes fonts look nicer at larger font sizes, it can cause text to appear rather unreadable once you decrease the point size below 10 points. However, if you want to use small point sizes, you still have some options:

• Use device fonts. Using device fonts can have several benefits. As discussed in Recipe 7.9, using device fonts can reduce the file size of the SWF. Additionally, device fonts aren’t anti-aliased, which makes them appear more legible at smaller point sizes. However, device fonts may not be the optimal solution in every case. Remember that when you tell Flash to use device fonts, it will use a font on the user’s computer. If the user doesn’t have the font, it will substitute the default system font. Thus device fonts are not appropriate when you require a specific font face. Furthermore, device fonts won’t respond in a predictable manner to some advanced formatting settings.

• Apply the anti-alias for readability setting. In Flash 8, you can select the Antialias for readability option from the Font rendering method menu in the Property inspector. The setting causes Flash ...