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Incomplete character set when embedding fonts in Flash MX on MacOS

I’m having problems displaying dynamic text in Flash MX. When I use an embedded (non device) font and publish the movie on a Macintosh, I lose some useful punctuation characters (curly quotes, en-dashes). If I publish the same file on Windows, it works okay. I’m guessing Flash on Macintosh isn’t embedding all the font outlines.

I’ve made a quick test flash source file. It’s a one-frame movie with a dynamic text field (with font embedded) which displays the variable “foo”, there’s a simple frame script:

foo = "this is an en dash: \u2013";
stop();

The \u2013 is a unicode escape for the en-dash character. The en-dash is available in the MacRoman codepage of my OS and is definitely available in the font (Verdana) I’m embedding.

I’ve been Googling to no avail and am now officially stumped. Someone posted a similar problem to the FlashCoders mailing list last October, which I find oddly reassuring.

It’s all massively frustrating because I’m now faced with the prospect of authoring on Windows for the duration of this project unless I can solve what’s going on! So now I’m soliciting for thoughts, advice, sympathy, tips, tricks, workarounds or guidance. Post them in my comments. Cheers!

Published at 12:05 pm on August 7th, 2003.
Topics: Flash

18 Comments

  1. More keywords for searchers: glyph, bug

    Comment by Tim at 1:48 pm on August 11th, 2003 #link

  2. Still no solution. There’s more on fonts in MX here: http://www.waxpraxis.org/archives/000048.html. Someone in the comments was having problems getting bulleted lists to display on MacOS. Sounds like a similar problem.

    Comment by Tim at 11:41 pm on September 8th, 2003 #link

  3. This has been fixed in Flash MX 2004. The problem seemed to be with the export to SWF from Flash 6, the same file exported from Flash 7 (as a Flash 6 SWF) plays fine in the old Flash 6 standalone player.

    Comment by Tim at 12:26 am on September 11th, 2003 #link

  4. (Actually, I’m not totally sure this has been fully fixed). This sounds familiar: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?1:mss:89384

    Comment by Tim at 10:56 pm on October 13th, 2003 #link

  5. Hi Tim, I have the same problem (macOs 9.2, flash MX) and it is a pain in the ass. I experience that it appears not with all fonts, and that the characters seem to be fine until the movie is exported for the first time. Also the characters are fine when writing into the textfield/in the working mode of the text. When you leave the Textfield the characters are distorted. i want to use the degree (°) and the german esszett (ß), and both are displaying wrong. Macromedia posts this: http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/macintosh_font.htm but after deleting all corrupt fonts on my system nothing changed in flash.

    Does Flash MX 2004 solved this problem for you? If so, I will get it right now. It’s important for a job and I have to solve this…

    Thank you and best wishes

    Comment by martin at 1:37 pm on October 28th, 2003 #link

  6. Martin, Flash MX 2004 fixed the problem for the file I posted, although I haven’t done any extensive testing!

    Comment by Tim at 3:14 pm on October 28th, 2003 #link

  7. Thank’s Tim, I’ll download the trial of Flash MX 2004 and test my file. The german version of MX isn’t ready, and I’m not working with X, yet. I just played around with MacOS X and tested some Apps, but I’m afraid that it will run far slower under production conditions. Flash MX is definitely faster on X than on 9. Can you recommend working with MacOs X?

    All the Best

    Comment by Martin at 4:26 pm on October 28th, 2003 #link

  8. I’m having a different, but similar problem. Let’s call it a codepage “interpretation” issue. This particular problem has NOT been fixed in Flash 2004.

    I’m pulling XML data from database and certain characters get incorrectly interpreted. For instance, the “registered” glyph (R) is displayed as a “dieresis” (umlout.) And the “trademark” glyph appears as a “ordfeminine” (superscript a).

    I “think” I know what the issue is…

    Flash is embedding the font in “Latin 1252″ order. However, input is being interpreted as “MacRoman”. (Or vice versa…) Authoring the movie on windows fixes the incorrect interpretation.

    By the way, the input format doesn’t matter (could be XML, HTML, text field.) The embedded Glyphs are in the wrong order.

    Comment by Alex at 9:42 pm on April 6th, 2004 #link

  9. I’m going crazy over here. Flash 2004 is not showing special characters (Latin characters) for all my bitmap fonts. Even in static fields it doesnt interprete them correctly. I’m running out of ideas! Is there a way to work around that problem? I’m on Mac OSX

    Comment by Arthur at 3:51 pm on July 21st, 2004 #link

  10. pain in the ass… but you could take a font, make all the uppercase characters superscript, and fill the lowercase characters with all the special symbols you need, embed the font, and in flash, change the font face to access superscript type and all the symbols you need. I was having problem not being able to get superscript text and symbols in dynamic text as well and is the only solution I could come up with.

    Comment by devast at 3:15 am on October 13th, 2004 #link

  11. Hi, I have a problem with text in flash. Some of them looks good but some others looks blurry. How can i fix it ?

    Comment by Gad at 1:13 am on December 18th, 2004 #link

  12. I have a similar problem with not being able to dynamically load special characters that are embedded.

    If anyone has any clues to a solution. I am definatly embedding the characters, but when i load the textfile with the special characters, flash doesn’t load them at all and omits them.

    :(

    -tim s

    Comment by Tim 2 at 7:17 pm on December 20th, 2004 #link

  13. We have problem in German language font display in Flash. All german text calling thru xml file some place it shows the characters but some place not. mostly special characters arae not display like two dots above ‘a’, ‘u’ etc..

    How can i fix it ?

    Comment by Parvez at 10:58 am on July 15th, 2005 #link

  14. I am using Flash 8 adn exporting to swf version 6. I’m embeeding all necessary flyphs and my output in German and French looks fine in IE but on Firefox all the special characters are not displaying. Is this problem fixed with MX 2004??

    Comment by Greg at 9:29 am on May 4th, 2006 #link

  15. Helpful info for Windows users trying to embed foreign (to your OS) fonts in the library:

    http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000211.php

    Comment by Mike at 1:20 am on November 2nd, 2006 #link

  16. System.useCodepage = true; solved the problem for me.

    Comment by fibo at 12:54 am on August 3rd, 2007 #link

  17. Hey Tim, I have created a powerpoint on Windows XP in Microsoft Power Point 2007 and I am using an FTP interface to send the file to my boss whose computer is a Macintosh and when she opens the file it either says “power point cannot read main file” or it opens and all of the fonts are different on her computer. How can I embed the fonts to get them to show up on her computer?

    Comment by Heather at 8:05 pm on August 31st, 2007 #link

  18. We’ve same problem with embedding Arabic fonts. textField.embedFonts just embed latin characters!

    Comment by Abdolhosein V. Ebrahimi at 8:13 am on August 31st, 2008 #link

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