Pixel fonts versus TT fonts.

July 20, 2006 10:52 PM

I’m looking for font recommendations for a multi-lingual online Flash application.

The application will need to display a lot of textual information along with imagery. I’d like to keep font size to a minimum (say 11 point) across all languages, of which Simplified Chinese and Indian Marathi will be two of the chosen languages.
Would pixel fonts be a better choice than standard True Type (ie in displaying the intricacies of a multi byte character at that size)?
Any font guideline references, personal horror stories, vignettes of personal success relating to this would be extremely appreciated.

posted by strawberryviagra to computers & internet (6 comments total)

With any of the double byte languages you will find yourself immediately limited by the choice of fonts.

Mainly I work in Japanese and most of the pixel fonts only cover hiragana and katakana scripts. Not kanji.

Also even at 11 point Japanese can be very difficult to read.

The best thing to do is play around with the different fonts, and try them out with no anti-alias, anti-alias for readability and so on within the Flash environment, and see how it looks (because obviously the font colour and the background colour will affect it as well). Quite a few times I will bump up the Japanese text in size a little compared to say English text so they look more even.
posted by gomichild at 11:22 PM on July 20, 2006

Excellent - thanks.

So, would you recommend the minimum font size as 12points across both, say, English and Kanji? Or are you suggesting that 12 point Kanji is roughly the same height as 11 point English?
posted by strawberryviagra at 11:30 PM on July 20, 2006

Depending on what font you use for either - but I usually find that 11 in English and 12 in Japanese seems to work for generic web fonts such as Verdana and Osaka.
posted by gomichild at 11:41 PM on July 20, 2006

Very important: If you're using un-aliased fonts in Flash, make sure that they're positioned on exact pixels, rather then something like: "X:10.4 Y:27.2" - otherwise they'll end up anti-aliased anyway. You probably already know this, but worth mentioning.
posted by blag at 3:15 AM on July 21, 2006

Also note that flash font sizes are in pixels not points. This means a size value of "10" is actually slightly different (smaller) than "10 point".

For localized flash applications you really want to use system fonts. Embeding a single font with level 1 kanji (eg: Arial Unicocde MS) takes upwards of 600 kb. And remember that flash considers norma, bold and italic to be separate fonts for purposes of embeding. So you can easily end up with 2 megabytes of SWF file going to just fonts. With system fonts you rely on the end-user having it installed on their machine but do not incure any size problems.

Of course the downside of system fonts is that you cannot anti-alias them and cannot adjust the _alpha value. In flash 8 you can kind of hack in alpha transitions by applying a blur filter with no blurring to a MovieClip containing the TextField but this can have a wide range of very nasty and unpredictable side effects so use it sparingly.
posted by Riemann at 6:03 AM on July 21, 2006

I should add that I'm a project manager - not a flash developer or designer - putting some additional touches on a design spec. All this, particularly Riemann's, is great info.
posted by strawberryviagra at 6:23 AM on July 21, 2006