shared font symbols - does a goat really need to die? -- flash (macromedia)

Stephen C
5/9/2007 10:40:33 PM

I am going competely spare with shared font symbols.

I have an application which opens several swfs and I want to use shared font
symbols for the considerable bandwidth saving.

I have correctly set up a share library with the fonts I require: 4 styles
of one font - Helvetica Neue Extended. I have included it 4 times in the
library with appropriate check boxes ticked for each style. I have correctly
imported the 4 font symbols into each of the Flash files which create the
swfs to be loaded into the movie. I have loaded the shared fonts into the
first frame of the first movie with a preloader to ensure they are fully
loaded.

They are correctly named in all instances and I have multiple-checked these
using find/replace. eg, where it is bold, it uses the bold alias and bold is
checked in the properties palette etc.

Now some swfs work when published and some have text fields missing.
Sometimes ones that worked stop working (text fields go missing - ie no font
info) for no apparent reason. And if I hold my mouth in the right position
when I click publish, they will work again. I just can't get all the swfs to
work - it is so flakey.

Do I need to face east and pray or sacrifice a goat?

Why can't font sharing simply work?

Stephen C
5/10/2007 12:00:00 AM

OK - solved my own problem after hours of downtime. In one instance a
supplied graphic contained a mysterious Mac character which was used for a
graphic effect which was invisible to me. It was also completely invisible
to search/replace - even search for text "any font". I finally found it by
checking the size report, identifying a rogue font - using its name in
search didnt't help, I had to copy and paste the unidentified character
rectangle into the search field to find it. And that was one fla. In some of
the others there were rogue characters inside text blocks containing both
bold and plain versions of the font that were not mapped to to the alias and
not showing up in search either.

There was no consistent type of failure resulting from these
inconsistencies, and no apparent debugging method either. There is a
disturbingly large number of worms in the shared font symbol can I'm afraid.

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flash (macromedia) : shared font symbols - does a goat really need to die?