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All fonts used in Movie Masher are 'embedded' so that text can be rotated and included in
bitmap operations. There is currently no support for 'system' fonts - every font used to
display text within Movie Masher must be included in an SWF and loaded via the configuration.
Additionally, font styling is not supported - a distinct SWF file must be made for each style variation
within a font family (bold, italic, etc.).
The SWF files themselves are not loaded
until they are actually needed to display text within a control or module, so there's no
harm in providing a wide font selection.
Several freely available fonts are included in the base distribution. To use one of
them, simply create an option tag for it somewhere in the configuration.
The id attribute you specify can then also be used as the font attribute
in media and control tags.
To use a custom font, first make sure it's installed on your local computer then
launch Adobe Flash™. Decide on an ID for your font which contains only letters and numbers
- it might also include the style (eg. 'HelveticaBold').
Duplicate one of the FLA files found in the com/moviemasher/font directory
(part of the source download)
and rename it using the font ID (plus the '.fla' file extension if your OS lets you see those).
Next, open the FLA file and edit the font symbol found in the Library panel.
Select the font and style you wish to embed. Then enter the font ID as the symbol name, and set
the class path identifier to 'com.moviemasher.font.' plus
the font ID. Click OK to exit the symbol editing dialog.
Next you'll want to go to the Formats tab of the Publish Settings dialog to change the publish path.
It's best to choose a destination path outside of the moviemasher hierarchy, so your custom fonts
are not accidentally overwritten during a subsequent upgrade. The SWFs need to be accessed by the
other applets though, so they must be stored within a web accessible directory.
And keep in mind that Flash's security model must be honored, so remember to have a crossdomain.xml
file at the top of the URL path.
Unicode Support
Theoretically, all higher range (international) characters found in the font will be copied to the
SWF file using the method just outlined. And in practice this works well for most commercially
available Unicode fonts. But some improperly formatted fonts fail to identify the higher range
character sets they support, causing Flash to ignore characters in those ranges. One workaround is
to manually include the character ranges in Flash's UnicodeTable.xml configuration file before
launching.
Please note that some language sets have a large number of characters in them, which can make the
resultant SWF file surprisingly large. This is a waste of
bandwidth if the characters aren't actually being used in your installation. The workaround described
above can also be used to remove unnecessary characters from particular sets. Please see the
Adobe Flash™ documentation for more information.
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