Anti-aliased htmlText in ActionScript?

Question

I basically have the same question as bder on the actionscript.org forums, namely if I can have my text anti-aliased if it is using an embedded font (Myriad Pro) to assign it to the htmlText property of a TextField and styling that with CSS.

Everything works fine with the text embedding and styling (the font is the one I want, and all its variations - bold, italic - are shown correctly), except that it looks bad, i.e. not anti-aliased. Of course, I have tried setting the antyAliasType and gridFitType properties to all possible combinations. Any ideas?

Oh, and I also tried writing my code exactly like in the example here, but did not work either, not sure why.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Actually I just made something this morning that used and embedded font so it was easy to test and see, and yes, when I changed the text property to the htmlText property of the textfield to <a href='http://www.google.com/'&gt;&lt;u&gt;google&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/a&gt; It produced a underline link and it has the antiAliasType set to AntiAliasType.ADVANCED.

Only thing is I am using a TextFormat rather than CSS.

My code is

        var myFont:Font = new Font1();

        quote = new TextField();
        quote.selectable = false;
        quote.embedFonts = true;
        quote.antiAliasType = flash.text.AntiAliasType.ADVANCED;

        quote.htmlText = "<a href='http://www.google.com/'&gt;&lt;u&gt;google&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/a&gt;";

        tf = new TextFormat();
        tf.font = myFont.fontName;
        tf.size = 24;
        tf.color = 0xffffff;
        tf.align = "center";

        quote.setTextFormat(tf);

Let me know if you have any questions.

Answer 2

This thread helped. The trick is to assign a TextFormat instance (with the correct default font) to the defaultTextFormat property of the TextField instace. So the whole code becomes

        var tf : TextField = new TextField();
        tf.selectable = false;
        tf.width = w;
        tf.height = h;

        tf.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
        tf.antiAliasType = AntiAliasType.ADVANCED;
        tf.gridFitType = GridFitType.PIXEL;
        tf.wordWrap = true;
        tf.multiline = true;
        tf.embedFonts = true;

        var tff : TextFormat = new TextFormat();
        tff.font = "Myriad Pro";
        tf.defaultTextFormat = tff;

        tf.styleSheet = _styles;

I hope this saves someone a headache.