PIXEL PROBLEMS IN FLASH

The problem of using pixel fonts in Flash is two-fold. First, Flash wants to anti-alias everything. In general, this is a good thing because it makes graphics look smoother (see Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4. Anti-aliasing can make shapes appear smoother.

Anti-aliasing also makes it easier to have unwanted anti-aliased, fuzzy text. The only way to globally turn off anti-aliasing is by setting the movie quality to low. You can do this by inserting the following code on your main timeline:

 highquality = 0. 

However, you usually want to keep the quality at its default value to benefit from the improved graphics rendering. Second, Flash cannot embed a normal pixel font based off of bitmaps. This means that the font you want to use cannot be stored within the movie so that it displays correctly on your end user's device. You can get around this by importing images of the text, but that eliminates the dynamic content capabilities of Flash.