Why flash on Mac does not display font correctly?

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Why flash on Mac does not display font correctly?

We have standard flex 3 project, and We have left everything as default, no change in style at all, and we deployed our project and noticed that on Mac the character spacing is very bad and overall look and feel is not as clear as that of windows.

Here is the difference, left one is Windows and right one is Mac.. the default flex font chosen by Adobe is "Verdana", the left one looks pretty, but right one looks as its width and character spacing, everything is incorrect. I assume verdana font may not be available on Mac, but in that case I supposed adobe should have given default standard font of good quality.

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What can we do to resolve this? Will embedding Verdana font in flex project style will help?

It's not a solution, but Verdana is available on every OS X box. See this Apple doc for 10.5; I couldn't find one on 10.6 but there is one.

Yuji 2010-07-10 01:39:31

Yes I saw it on my box too, Verdana is there, but the way Flash displays, it sucks ..

Akash Kava 2010-07-10 11:04:03

Mac OS X and Windows have different text rendering engines. I've heard it said that Mac OS X tries to preserve the character shape while Windows tries to align with screen pixels at small sizes.

That's going to result in differences between how fonts are rendered, and there's really no way to work around it.

Personally, I think the example on the right looks much nicer; the one on the left looks square, like it's being rendered at too small a size, while the one on the right looks more like the font is supposed to look.

Chris Hanson 2010-07-11 21:44:23

Well the one on Mac is on the right and it looks bad, because Verdana is supposed to be a square look and feel font, and its more readable. I saw one difference that Mac has no way to change font size, I noticed that font size on mac is bigger then windows.

Akash Kava 2010-08-07 19:54:26

No, really, what you're seeing is the difference between how te Mac renders fonts to preserve character shape, and Windows renders fonts to fit a grid.Also, a 12pt font will render with more pixels on Windows than the Mac because Windows assumes 96pt per inch whole the Mac (like PostScript printers) assumes 72pt per inch.These are differences between the platforms you just have to live with. This is **not** the Mac doing it "wrong" in any way. (Arguably, the Mac is rendering things correctly; it's Windows that renders it wrong.)

Chris Hanson 2010-08-15 04:20:34

In fact, you might be best off using a different font entirely on the Mac. Just because Adobe made Verdana the default for Flex doesn't mean you have to (or should) use it.User interfaces on the Mac should use Lucida Grande 11 and 13, regardless of what technology you use to build them, because that's what the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines say. "Looks the same on both platforms" is not a good thing outside games.

Chris Hanson 2010-08-15 04:23:41

I will try to use some different font, but thats quite painful job as there are lot of ui elements and every element needs changes in font so creating a new css with all the elements is little combersome as there is no standard one offered by flex, but honestly i hate mac :)

Akash Kava 2010-09-25 13:29:36

ansaurus

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Why flash on Mac does not display font correctly?

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