Re: FLASH: Text making big flash files

[Michael Penne]

If you think about it, text in vector is actually

quite complex, a nice thing about flash for

x-platform, x-browser development is that embedded

fonts look the same.


However, this is achieved by creating outlines of the

fonts in vector format, which, depending on font, can

contain quite a few curves and thus make large files.


A coupla tricks: To keep file sizes small, use the

minumum amount of different fonts, flash's aa makes

text at small font sizes look pretty blurry, so for

that I use fields without font outlines. When you do

this, the swf gets the fonts form the client machine,

so the usual html problems/work arounds with fonts

apply (ie use common fonts and leave space in the

fields). Third, create your text small, make it into

symbols, and scale the symbols (_anything_ in your

movie that is keyframed more than once shold be a

symbol).

Animating text is the same as animating other complex

vector shapes, try to move only one thing at once to

avoid the herky-jerkies. Finally, for large text files

I would use a flash interface and/or buttons and leave

most of the text in html, also that way folks can

print it from @#$&*! MSIE 5.


---

vachonechonyc [dot] com

 wrote:

> 

> Does Flash handle text less elegantly than it does

> other vectors?

> 

> My client asked for a piece to advertise a private

> financial website--

> lots of columns of boring figures.

> 

> I made screen captures of 6 pages from the website.

> Then I 

> overlaid them with brightly colored animated

> explanatory text. It 

> looked great, but of course the bitmaps of the

> website are sharp 

> only when the window is at the original size. The

> client asked if the 

> screengrabs can be any sharper.

> 

> Since the original website is all text and numbers,

> I was able to 

> easily recreate these 6 pages in Flash. I did this

> and discarded the 

> bitmaps. No good! The .swf size is somewhat smaller

> (102kb vs. 

> 168kb) but the animation is now unacceptably jerky

> and slow, 

> particularly when these big blocks of text are

> moving.

> 

> Are there any special tricks when working with lots

> of text?




=====

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