Just Another Handle -- Do we work in the same team? : )
I second the question. The team I am on is trying to solve the same types of issues. What I've dug up so far has led to the following conclusions: - There are [too] many ways to deal with fonts, text, and styles in Flash/Flex. The list is also growing fast. See Flex 4 aka Gumbo and its revamping of text with several new classes and a couple new frameworks to support bidirectional languages and dynamic text layout. - Resource bundles appear to be an elegant way to handle localization of any type of resource -- strings, fonts, animations, code classes, etc. They allow "cascading" from specific to default locales, mixing statically compiled locales with dynamically loaded ones as needed, and very little code to make it all work. The caveat is that it is within the Flex framework, which may or may not be compatible with "ActionScript" projects or apps built entirely in CS3/4. - For styling, CSS is supported by both Flex and Flash (better than HTML is supported, but not better than, say, IE5). If your designers are up on their web skills, they shouldn't have any trouble creating styles via CSS, but CS3/4 don't provide any means to generate CSS from visually created text styles that I've found. Workflow may be an issue. FlexBuilder does allow you to visually style and then generate CSS, but this is aimed at Flex components. Maybe useful depending on what types of apps you are making. - It is possible to dynamically load embedded fonts. That is, create SWFs containing embedded font/glyph sets, then dynamically load these into a running app as needed and apply to even Flash CS-authored TextFields. It isn't obvious how to do this, but it is possible. Our group is exploring this now. I may post more as I understand the details and as people on the list are interested. -Jason _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
