HOWTO – embed fonts from a SWF into a Flex app

I haven’t done any coding in Flex yet, but I came across this howto today that illustrates how simple it is to pull in a Flash SWF that has an embedded font and use it within the Flex application. Embedding the bold, italic, and bold-italic sets for a font allows you to use the standard <b> and <i> tags in an htmlText element that is using the embedded font.

As an aside, it appears that Flex even allows you to do a rotation on the text even when it’s not using a standard system font. This is something that was a total pain with embedded fonts in Flash/AS2, requiring rendering the text on the fly as a bitmap and then rotating the bitmap version. Major headache.

I’m pretty excited to see that text effects like this have become so simple to achieve. Now, if only someone could figure out how to lighten the file size when you’re trying to embed a traditional Chinese character set.

Embedding fonts from a Flash SWF file into a Flex application