Popa Mihai

Most of the times when you embed a font in Flex the font won’t look exactly how you want it. Flex offers 4 FlashType style properties that can be used to improve the appearance of the embedded fonts in your applications. There properties are fontAntiAliasType, fontGridFitType, fontSharpness, and fontThickness.

• fontAntiAliasType sets the antiAliasType property and can have two values: nomal or advanced
• fontGridFitType sets the gridFitType property and can have three values: none, pixel, and subpixel
• fontSharpness sets the sharpness property and can take values between -400 and 400
• fontThickness sets the thickness property and can take values between -200 and 200

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When you embed fonts in you Flex applications most of the time the size of the application will increase with up to 400K.

In most cases you can reduce the size of the resulting SWF by embedding only the characters that will actually be used in the application. There is no point in embedding numbers and punctuation if you only use a-z and A-Z letters in your application. This is particularly useful when the embedded font is only used in the title of the application or on some fancy buttons which don’t use numbers or punctuation.

To do this you must specify the character ranges when embedding the font with CSS by using the unicodeRange property.
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This example shows another method you could use to embed fonts in Flex.

Usually when you embed fonts in Flex you use CSS. Here is how to embed fonts in a Flex Application with CSS.

In this example I will use the [Embed] tag to embed the fonts in Flex. Here is how this is done:
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In this example I will embed two fonts in Flex: one that is installed on the local computer and one from a specified URL.

In this example I used CSS to embed fonts in Flex. When you embed the font in Flex you must specify the source and the fontFamily. Here is the syntax used to embed a font in Flex using CSS, when the font is already installed on the computer:

		@font-face {
			src: local("Courier New");
			fontFamily: CourierEmbedded;
		}

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This example shows how to customize the appearance of the Flex VSlider, by changing the data tip appearance, using a custom image to skin the thumb and the track images and more.

Here is an image of what the application will achieve:

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This example shows how to customize the appearance of the Flex HSlider, by changing the data tip appearance, using a custom image to skin the thumb and the track images and more.

Here is an image of what the application will achieve:

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The following example will use custom images to customize the appearance of the Flex Vertical Scroll Bar (VScrollBar).

First I created the art work for the custom VScrollBar. The elements that this example changes are: downArrow, upArrow, thumb and the track.

This is how the finished custom VScrollBar will appear:

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The following example will use custom images to customize the appearance of the Flex Horizontal Scroll Bar (HScrollBar).

First I created the art work for the custom HScrollBar. The elements that this example changes are: downArrow, upArrow, thumb and the track.

This is how the finished custom HScrollBar will appear:

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The default Flex controls look pretty good, but in most situations you will want to add custom graphics to your Flex applications. The following example will use a custom skin made with Flash CS3 to customize the appearance of the Flex RadioButton.

The steps that you must take are pretty straight forward:

1. Create the art work with Flash for the up, down, over, selectedUp, selectedDown, selectedOver states for the custom RadioButton
2. Convert the artwork to symbols and export them for ActionScript
3. Use the resulting SWF in a Flex application to create a custom Flex RadioButton

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This short example will show how you can use Flash CS3 Professional to create a custom skin that you can then use to create a custom button for your Flex applications.

The steps that we will take:

1. Create the art work with Flash for the up, down, over and disabled states for the custom button
2. Convert the artwork to symbols and export them for ActionScript
3. Use the resulting SWF in a Flex application to create a custom Flex Button

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