When it comes to creating a website in Flash, unless your website contains only graphics or something, it is crucial to chose the correct font for content projection.
We usually have 2 choices: either a medium-sized, but clear font or small and super-crisp, pixel-font.
The former is, it seems, a more common practice. One reason for that is websites with such fonts look different - you just feel that you are on a Flash site, not a normal one. Another reason why is not all people know to use pixel fonts.
The drawback of using "normal" fonts is as follows: fonts must be kept relatively big in order to preserve a good level of readibility, therefore they tend to occupy a lot of space, if a text is long.
So, if you're eager to make your text very readable, there is no other way to go than pixel fonts. Pixel fonts are special fonts designed at low resolution especially for screen display, so they look clear and crisp at small sizes.
You have never seen them? How wrong you are! You're reading a pixel font at the moment. Just have a look at a magnified screenshot of this text:
How to use pixel fonts in Flash
Using pixel fonts in Flash is not as easy and obvious as it might seem. First of all, do make sure that you have a pixel font installed in your system. If you haven't, you can download free pixel fonts from these sites.
Ready? Now create a textbox with the Text Tool and choose the right font. Here go three critically imporant things: make sure that the textbox is on whole pixels, if x and y values have decimals, the fonts will appear blurry.
The other thing is choosing the correct display mode. Anti-alias for animation should be chosen for best results.
Finally, you should know that pixel fonts, unlike True Type fonts, and designed to be used at only one size. It is usually 8px, sometimes different sizes. Most frequently you can look it up in the ReadMe.txt file that goes with your pixel font.
I hope this tutorial helped you understand what pixel fonts are and how to use them.
