For the Little Guys

[ LiB ]

Designers are continuing to use smaller and smaller fonts in their designs. Sometimes doing so gives them more room, and some of them are just excited about making visitors read their text with a loupe. Either way, if you're one of these people, you'll be glad to know that Flash MX 2004 has introduced a new option to help you optimize smaller text.

If you select any text field on your stage and look to the Property inspector, you'll notice a new button just to the right of the Auto Kern option. Clicking this new Alias Text button will toggle whether Flash applies aliasing to this text field. Aliasing is font smoothing and is often the cause of hard-to-read small text. It's recommended that you only use this option for text fields with a point size of 11 and under. Any font size bigger than that usually looks pretty good with aliasing turned on.

[ LiB ]