Phil Peron Flash Platform Developer and Game Development Hobbyist

Embedding Fonts Using AS3 and Flex 4 Ant Tasks

I’m posting this as a reminder to myself and as a beacon of hope to others who need to embed a font in ActionScript 3 and build using Ant. It took me forever to find a solution (shown in step 3).

The documention didn’t provide enough information. What I’d like is a chart similar to what they have in the livedocs for mxmlc options but whatever… at least the source code was included. The answers always live there.

1) Embed the Font

[Embed(source="COOLFONT.TTF", fontName="CoolFont", mimeType="application/x-font-truetype")]
public var CoolFont:Class;

2) Prep the TextField and TextFormat Instances

_textFormat = new TextFormat();
_textFormat.font = "CoolFont";
_textField = new TextField();
_textField.embedFonts = true;
_textField.defaultTextFormat = _textFormat;

3) Add Font Managers to Your Build File

<fonts>
<manager class="flash.fonts.AFEFontManager"/>
</fonts>

This was the missing link for me. Without it, you’ll get nothing but transcoding errors. If you’re familiar with the font manager listing in flex-config.xml, you’ll notice it’s close enough to confuse the issue when adding managers to your build script.

If you’re interested in learning more about font managers the livedocs actually do come in handy. You can read about them here.