Advanced text rendering

OpenFL provides a variety of classes in the openfl.text package to control the properties of displayed text, including embedded fonts, anti-aliasing settings, alpha channel control, and other specific settings. The OpenFL API Reference provides detailed descriptions of these classes and properties, including the Font class.

Using embedded fonts

When you specify a specific font for a TextField in your application, OpenFL looks for a device font (a font that resides on the user's computer) with the same name. If it doesn't find that font on the system, or if the user has a slightly different version of a font with that name, the text display could look very different from what you intend. By default, the text appears in a Times Roman font.

To make sure the user sees exactly the right font, you can embed that font in your application. Embedded fonts have a number of benefits:

• Embedded font characters are anti-aliased, making their edges appear smoother, especially for larger text.

• You can rotate text that uses embedded fonts.

• Embedded font text can be made transparent or semitransparent.

• You can use the kerning CSS style with embedded fonts.

The biggest limitation to using embedded fonts is that they increase the file size or download size of your application.

Once you have embedded a font you can make sure a TextField uses the correct embedded font:

• Set the embedFonts property of the TextField to true.

• Create a TextFormat object, set its fontFamily property to the name of the embedded font, and apply the TextFormat object to the TextField. When specifying an embedded font, the fontFamily property should only contain a single name; it cannot use a comma-delimited list of multiple font names.

• If using CSS styles to set fonts for TextFields or components, set the font-family CSS property to the name of the embedded font. The font-family property must contain a single name and not a list of names if you want to specify an embedded font.

Embedding a font

In a Lime project.xml file, include font files using the <assets> element.

<assets type="font" path="path/to/font.ttf"/>