I've been fooling around with text and anti-aliasing the fonts in Flash in some very twisted ways.. and ran into a little fun that I thought I'd share to see what others have done to work around this.

One of the nice things (in the past anyway) about using embedded fonts instead of the system fonts was that the text remained fixed in place and didn't jump font sizes as the text was stretched or transformed. For instance, if you take text using _sans system font and stretch it larger and smaller in a smooth motion you'll see the font size jump drastically from one font size to the next. However, with embedded fonts the font size would increase smoothly and the text would seem to grow and shrink smoothly.

Now since Flash Player 8 we've had "anti-alias for readability" or if you're into code it's myTextField.antiAliasType="advanced". It provides a better looking anti-aliasing, but throws in a new bit of trouble. The spacing between the characters (letterSpacing) seems to vary as the TextField is stretched making the text appear to shake around. I've got an example here, and if you look at it you have to resize your browser window in and out smoothly and kind of slowly so you can get the full effect.

Click here to see an example

FLA and HTML here

and - - this is important because it's possible for text to word-wrap as it's stretched and that could wreck a layout.