I haven’t posted in a while because I am full time in development of localized Flash applications in 11 languages with Flash 8 / AS2. The objective was that I include embedded fonts with externalized xml and css content. (Embedded fonts are required since I cannot modify properties with device fonts such as rotation and scaling.) Then I created tags in my xml file to correspond to labels in my animations. This was a tricky job, but I got it worked out.
The hardest aspect of localization development was to embed fonts into flash. There are many sites that addresses localization in flash development. (I realized that such development is getting to be an art form.) The Adobe site unfortunately doesn’t really help that much in this respect.
The free Fontastic engine at http://www.flashextensions.com is a good site. He also gives a quick overview of the intricacies of localization with Flash since Flash Player 7. There are video tutorials, but it has been very difficult to get in touch with the web administrator. I even tried to use three different emails to renew my video subscription but to no avail. Anyways, I had to move on and continue development.
Fontastic inspired me to use font symbols in external libraries. Later, I found that in my development that I was restricted to use only 255 characters. This is great for latin based characters (e.g. English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese…) Maybe with exception to French. I needed to include the “oe” character, by creating a new font. (I use fontCreator by High Logic. )
Since I had to develop for Japanese, Chinese, and Greek, I was forced to include Unicode. So I thought about scouring the web one last time. But lo and behold, there was the casaframework.org. What the Zend framework is for PHP, the Casa framework is for Flash AS2. (An AS3 is in the works as we speak.) I began using the FontManager class and removed all references to my font library symbols. I had successfully ported over to Japanese and am working on Greek and Chinese.
Notable Links:
Flash and CSS:
http://www.blog.lessrain.com/?p=98
http://www.connectedpixel.com/blog/fonts/cssembedding
Flash Shared Font Libraries:
http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000227.php
http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000211.php
Flash and Unicode:
http://polygeek.com/110_adobeflash/actionscript_unicode-in-flash
Flash and Device Fonts: (A hack)
Dynamic Fonts with Flash:
