SWF Formatted Fonts Library
I came across a post on Ryan Stewart’s blog with a very useful link to a post on isarie.com with a listing of available fonts formatted as SWFs, which can be easily used in Flex. I was actually thinking about doing something like this as well as creating icon library SWFs, but I’m glad I didn’t go through the trouble of duplicating others’ efforts. Font copyrights also was factor, but it looks like most of these fonts can be found from free font resources like fontfreak.com, 1001freefonts.com and in your system fonts library.
This listing of SWF formatted fonts is a great resource and can be a time saver especially since doing something as quick as changing the fonts in your Flex app can start to make it take on a more “custom” look. The few fonts I tried worked great after I got the fontFamily names figured out. One thing to keep in mind is these fonts might be best suited for use as “display” or accent fonts as I found several that didn’t have special characters like bullets, an @ symbol, etc. and may not be suitable for dynamic or user inputted text. Also, it saves you from needing Flash or going through the trouble of creating the font embedded SWF in Flash. Although you could always create an embedded font SWF in Flex via Actionscript and the compiler.
April 14th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Very cool.
As a corollary to your post: TT (TrueType)fonts can be embedded directly via a css file or via mxml. OT (OpenType) fonts cannot (at least yet.. I’d think Adobe will fix this so that Flex can embed both TT and OT fonts directly). So, you need to embed/export the OT font via a swf (using Flash) and them import that into your css for Flex if the font is OT and not TT.
April 14th, 2007 at 11:44 am
this is a great idea. i posted a similar feature request to adobe a few months back for adobe to setup a “Adobe” font site with some standard adobe fonts with an open cross domain policy. then once a user used a flex app that used a font from the adobe site they would have it in their cache for future use. the current app wouldn’t have to download it again and apps from different domains wouldn’t have to download it again either because it would already be downloaded.
go wish for it http://www.adobe.com/go/wish/
its something i hope we all can see