Dynamic Textfields in Flash AS3 and Their Bugs
I do a ton of localizations for web-based media (over 30 countries) and have run across several bugs in Flash where the characters don’t show up for certain fonts, especially for translations with non-latin characters (such as Russian, Chinese, Japanese and even Hungarian and German). I always complain about them, and instead of just complaining, I figured I’d share some of the solutions since they’re bugs in Flash and may not have obvious solutions.
Obvious Solutions
The obvious solution when you have a dynamic text field, that is either driven from XML, RSS, or other external document or data source, is to embed the font’s character sets. Obviously if you are going to be using Korean in your Flash application, you want to embed the Korean character sets so the Korean characters show up in the font you have chosen. However, with so much emphasis on branding these days, not all specialized fonts have characters in Korean.
For example, the Star Wars Jedi font that I once worked with has absolutely no other characters beyond A-Z, a-z and numerals. Forget Spanish and it’s tildes, forget German and its umlauts, but Russian?! Ha! Everyone knows there were no Russian Jedis! So, what to do?
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