Why flash on Mac does not display font correctly?

2
votes

We have standard flex 3 project, and We have left everything as default, no change in style at all, and we deployed our project and noticed that on Mac the character spacing is very bad and overall look and feel is not as clear as that of windows.

Here is the difference, left one is Windows and right one is Mac.. the default flex font chosen by Adobe is "Verdana", the left one looks pretty, but right one looks as its width and character spacing, everything is incorrect. I assume verdana font may not be available on Mac, but in that case I supposed adobe should have given default standard font of good quality.

alt text http://akashkava.com/images/MacFlashFontProblem.png

What can we do to resolve this? Will embedding Verdana font in flex project style will help?

2
macosflex3fonts
Because Steve doesn't like Adobe! :) - Tommy
And we all dont like Steve too !! - Akash Kava
STOP CALLING IT "MAC". It's "Mac". Or "Macintosh". Or "Mac OS X". But it's not an acronym, so don't write it in all caps. - Paul Tomblin
FYI, the image is broken and my script is unable to fix it. - Glorfindel

2 Answers

1
votes

Mac OS X and Windows have different text rendering engines. I've heard it said that Mac OS X tries to preserve the character shape while Windows tries to align with screen pixels at small sizes.

That's going to result in differences between how fonts are rendered, and there's really no way to work around it.

Personally, I think the example on the right looks much nicer; the one on the left looks square, like it's being rendered at too small a size, while the one on the right looks more like the font is supposed to look.

0
votes

It's not a solution, but Verdana is available on every OS X box. See this Apple doc for 10.5; I couldn't find one on 10.6 but there is one.