Is there any possible way of having a crisp clean bitmapped font under a mask, as soon as you imbedd the font it becomes smooth and horrible, difficult to read

any suggestions

Ask your users to update the player - the more recent versions support masking of device fonts. Note that this is only useful if your users *have* the fonts installed on their machines - otherwise you have to use the antialiased embedded fonts, or some of the Flash-specific bitmap fonts some folks have built.