sIFR, Flash and Unicode

Posted on Sep 27, 2005

As part of my larger globalization project I am internationalizing one of our brand sites. In order to do so, I am using the sIFR 2.0 tool that I have previously raved about. In doing so I came across something that is obvious once you see it, but not so obvious until you run into the issue. This is that the fonts you use must be Unicode fonts in order to use this tool in a globalized site. I ran into this in adding a header with the Ä character. The font choice in this case (percolator) has that character but isn't Unicode. Since Flash converts all characters to UTF-8, this character will not show up no matter how many Glyphs I export (system.useCodepage doesn't seem to fix the problem either). The point is to be careful of your font choices when globalizing your application if you need to render these characters in Flash...unless someone has any ideas on a way to get around this?

Comments

Jeff Fal You would have to embed the special characters, which I am not sure is an option or not for that app. I know if you don't have any special characters embedded it will not show them at all. I have never used this tool, so I am not sure how much help I can really be. IM me at work if you want more suggestions, or I may just IM you in a sec.

-jeff

Posted By Jeff Fal / Posted on 09/28/2005 at 10:47 AM

Brian Rinaldi Thanks Jeff, but embedding the characters doesn't work actually. It is allowed by sIFR and is very simple to do but won't work regardless because the font is not a Unicode font. Even specifying exactly the a with umlaut character won't fix the issue as it shows up as an entirely different character.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 09/28/2005 at 12:25 PM

Jay I know it might sound stupid, but does the page have unicode encoding?

Posted By Jay / Posted on 09/30/2005 at 3:13 PM

Brian Rinaldi Jay, Not stupid at all. It didn't. However, that has been fixed and it still doesn't affect the Flash. It is purely the font in this case as most other fonts I have used do not have this issue.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 09/30/2005 at 3:42 PM

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About

My name is Brian Rinaldi and I am the Web Community Manager for Flash Platform at Adobe. I am a regular blogger, speaker and author. I also founded RIA Unleashed conference in Boston. The views expressed on this site are my own & not those of my employer.