I followed the explanation on the sIFR wiki, but can't seem to get accented characters to display in my Flash movie. I opened up the Character Embedding palette, pasted "ÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ" into the "Include these characters" field after the ampersand, hit "OK", then re-exported the .SWF.
The characters still don't render in my sIFR file--any suggestions? I'm running r436.
could be that the encoding between the webpage/javascript and flash isn't picking up the special chars - have you debugged your javascript to see what's being passed in?
[edit] what is the webpage encoding set to?[/edit]
have you tried checking the 'Basic Latin' or 'Latin I' boxes (just for sanity check?) I've just looked through mine and I use 'Latin I'.
Perhaps the font you're using just doesn't include those characters? Frequently, fonts will support just ascii.
As jeremy said, the major issue i've seen with sifr and charecters is that special charecters aren't part of the font you are using.
One way to test is run your current method with another standard font such as arial, if it works then it's probably down to your font.
What font is it?
Secondly when making the font glyphs inside flash you have to change the settings to include any foreign characters to insure they are within the font flash movie. most none standard characters are removed as it keeps the file size of the swf font file down.
hi. when you view the generated source (below) you'll see that the chars are being encoded by javascript...
content=This%2520is%2520an%2520embedding%2520test%253A%253Cbr%253E%25C3%25C4%25C5%25C6%25C7%25C8%25C9%25CA%25CB%25CC%25CD%25CE%25CF
can you switch on HTML on the text field to see if they show up?
I suspect its a problem with Flash. If I go to your example page (http://unstoppablerobotninja.com/demos/sifr-encode/), right-click on the Flash movie, and copy to the clipboard, this is the output:
This is an embedding test:
ÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõöøùúûüýþÿ
Did it work?
Which to me indicates that the characters are ending up just fine in the Flash movie, but they're not being rendered.
Can Flash render these characters if you use static publishing for some other Flash movie?
I have the same problem with a dynamic text field not rendering special characters, despite the field being set up correctly and the specific characters required being embedded in the field.
I noticed that HTML source text which is formatted to appear as Bold (i.e. using tags) creates this problem - the same text without Bold results in the special chars being rendered correctly (although obviously not in Bold :) I tried various things including using the unicode reference and exporting the Bold variant of the font (Verdana) but nothing helps, so I think it's a Flash bug.
Of course, knowing this doesn't solve the problem if you need to use a Bold font, like I do - I'm still looking for solutions and will post back if I find something.
Good luck ;)
Solving the Bold issue is easy. Special characters not appearing is another problem entirely and one in which we are encountering currently.
Here's the deal with bold (and italic):
If you use bold or italic tags in the HTML, Flash has not necessarily embedded the bold and italic version of the font. What you have to do is create some hidden dynamic text fields that have the bold and italic versions of the font embedded. These hidden text fields can be placed in a frame past the end of the timeline so that they don't appear at runtime.
A related problem is when you click the B (for bold) in the properties panel and insert HTML text into the textfield without a <b> tag. Flash will embed the bold font into the SWF, but if you don't insert the <b> tag in your text, Flash will render it with a non-bold font (which won't appear because it wasn't embedded).
Unfortunately, we have a situation where a dynamic text field was created with one font, and if we change it to any other font, it doesn't render. Special characters, such as the ® symbol, don't render, even though they are embedded in the font. This is with Flash CS3 and AS2.