FLASH: any way to reduce file size of text blocks?

[Laura Hamilton]

Hello Flashers!


I (like Sohrab) am almost finished with my portfolio site (created in Flash

4), but I would love to be able to get it down in size a bit. It's at 164KB

right now in the main movie, which takes 30 seconds to preload on a 56K

modem. Too long!


(There are an additional 350KB in screenshot images that load as SWF files

into a placeholder MC when called).


I have a large amount of text on my site: a resume, descriptions of

projects, a personal profile...and that text is by far the biggest file size

hog. I can't believe the amount of space it takes up. I have nearly all of

it in text blocks, and there are about three different fonts total.


I could remove those and just make the font sans-serif, but I need the text

to fit into very tight spaces, and I'm afraid that if the user has a

sans-serif font with more widely-spaced kerning, for example, the text will

bleed out of its assigned space.


My question:

Is there something that I can do to reduce the file size of these text

blocks? I tried breaking apart the text blocks and converting the text to

outlines, but that instantly made my movie size *huge*.


I'm not really understanding why text is so expensive to use (size-wise) in

Flash. Any way to get around this and reduce the size of my movie, besides

using less text?


Thanks for any suggestions,

Laura Hamilton


(who is thrilled to be nearly done with this site, but now has to make the

HTML version. Ugh! I cannot look at this interface any more!)







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