Using Type > About embedded fonts and device fonts

When you use a font installed on your system in a Flash movie, Flash embeds the font information in the Flash SWF file, ensuring that the font displays properly in the Flash Player. Not all fonts displayed in Flash can be exported with a movie. To verify that a font can be exported, use the View > Antialias Text command to preview the text; jagged type indicates that Flash does not recognize that font's outline and will not export the text.

As an alternative to embedding font information, you can use special fonts in Flash called device fonts. Device fonts are not embedded in the Flash SWF file. Instead, the Flash Player uses whatever font on the local computer most closely resembles the device font. Because device font information is not embedded, using device fonts yields a somewhat smaller Flash movie file size. In addition, device fonts can be sharper and more legible than embedded fonts at small type sizes (below 10 points). However, because device fonts are not embedded, if users do not have a font installed on their system that corresponds to the device font, type may look different than expected on a user's system.

Flash includes three device fonts, named _sans (similar to Helvetica or Arial), _serif (similar to Times Roman), and _typewriter (similar to Courier). To specify a font as a device font, you select one of the Flash device fonts in the Character panel, or select Use Device Fonts in the Text Options panel. You can specify text set in a device font to be selectable, so that users can copy and paste text that appears in your movie. See Using device fonts.

You can use device fonts for static text (text that you create when authoring a movie and that does not change when the movie is displayed) or dynamic text (text that updates periodically through input from a file server, such as sports scores or weather data). For information on dynamic text, see Creating text boxes for user input or dynamically updating text.