Flash and Loading External Fonts – Part 1

You may have heard this elsewhere and not believed it (I did … didn’t?). If you want your (loaded) fonts to work in (loaded) flash movies, those movies may not (bold because I mean it) refer to those fonts. Don’ts:

• You may not put the field on stage, set it to the desired font, but (purposefully) turn off font embedding. Flash will assume this swf has no outlines for this font and refuse to look elsewhere.
• You may not have a static textfield that points to a font you (also) wish to load dynamically. Flash will only embed those outlines used in the static text and refuse to look elsewhere.
• You may not break these rules on your main timeline, in (exported) library symbols, or try to load fonts first, and then load a swf which breaks these rules. Fonts will be broken for those swfs that try.

There are other resources out there detailing a few techniques for embedding fonts via a loaded swf. I’m going to save my juice for talking about the joy that happens (doesn’t happen) when you try to embed bold and italics (which works) and then use them (which probably won’t).