Pixel Fonts in Flash
When you need small type in Flash, for interface elements or captions, regular printer fonts just don't work. With anti-aliasing on, they blur badly. Without it, they look jagged and crude. Flash, being an animation program, requires each frame to be rendered as quickly as possible and that means that font smoothing is not as good as it could be. Anti-aliasing in Flash is optimised for speed, not quality. Small type sizes that are smoothed acceptably in a bitmap editor will usually look much fuzzier in Flash.
If you publish your Flash movie in 'Low Quality', anti-aliasing is switched off. With less processing to do, the animation runs faster and smoother. The trouble is, if you have any slanted lines or curved shapes, they will look jagged.
Published at 'High Quality' or any of the intermediate settings, you will get some degree of anti-aliasing. This is ideal for curved shapes but not for small type. So, the trick is to have small type that doesn't anti-alias, even at high quality settings.
If you can arrange for each and every pixel in a type character to fit the pixel grid of the screen exactly (Example 1 below), there will be no anti-aliasing and the type will look sharp regardless of the published quality. It's when font pixels straddle screen pixels that anti-aliasing occurs (Example 2 below).
Example 1
Example 2
X and Y points set to non fraction values to prevent anti-aliasing.
Like TrueType and PostScript fonts, Macromedia Flash is a vector format and is resolution independent. With vector shapes and regular fonts, Flash will render any frame at any size. That's fine until you introduce something of a specific pixel measurement. A GIF image, for instance, will not scale well. If it is originally 100 x 50 pixels and you resize it to 150 x 75 pixels, where do the extra pixels come from? They have to be guessed at by looking at the surround ones - a process called interpolation. Depending on the image, a scaled GIF image can look anything from 'not quite right' to totally awful, as rows of pixels are either invented or discarded. The same goes for pixel fonts but, where some softer GIF images are just about acceptable when scaled, type, with definite hard edges, will suffer badly.
So, to use pixel fonts in Flash, you have to make sure that every pixel in the type synchronises precisely with the pixels of the screen.
The first thing you have to do is to make sure you are working at a magnification scale of exactly 100%. By default, your workspace will be at an arbitrary size determined by the size of your monitor. Use the 'View' menu or magnification popup at the top right of the work area to set 100%. Also, make sure that your document measurement units are pixels and not points, inches or millimetres. This is done in the 'Modify' menu under 'Document...'
When you place any object in Flash, it can fall at fractional x, y coordinates. Flash MX has a 'Snap to Pixels' item in the 'View' menu which snaps new objects, and static text, to the screen's pixel grid. Make sure it is switched on otherwise you might have to adjust type box coordinates manually in the 'Info' palette.Pixel fonts have to be set at the correct 'designed' size. You can't specify just any size. If the font is designed correctly, every character should be sharp with no anti-aliasing. If the font size is ten pixels, you can set the type at 10 or, if you want a deliberate pixelated look, at 20, 30, 40 or any multiple of 10.
Setting it Right
Whether you are using pixel fonts in Flash, or any other program, there are certain things that you need to be aware of.
Apart from making sure that the type size is set correctly, you have to avoid any transformations that will take the pixels off grid. This rules-out any form of letter spacing, kerning, adjustments to character width or baseline shift. All these introduce sub-pixel measurements that are okay for print type, but pixel fonts can only work with whole pixels.
In the paragraph tab, always set pixel fonts ranged left or ranged right. Setting them centred introduces approximations that can take the setting off grid.
