Arial Font doesn't display properly in Mac

Question

I have a flash movie with a dynamic text that supposedly is Arial, and in my windows machine it displays as Arial. But when I tried it in a Mac, it shows as something like Times New Roman.

I tried every property available and can't seem to get it to show as Arial on the Mac.

I found another movie I had that didn't have this problem, so to pinpoint the problem I made a very simple movie. First I took a dynamic text from the other movie that worked and pasted it a new fla. Then I created a new text, and copied every property one by one. When I published it, the original text was showing as Arial, but not the new one, even if they had the same properties! (at least the ones I can edit in flash's properties editor.

I'm using Adobe Flash CS3 Professional.

What do you think can be the problem?? Are there any properties that aren't in the property editor? (I also checked filters, and Transformations)

Both are Dynamic texts, with no Instance Name, "Anti-alias for animation", Multiline, I'm not embeding the font and have checked "Render text as HTML".

Answer 1

Use Arial/Helvetica FontFamily

Answer 2

If you're not embedding the font then you're at the mercy of the player, and Arial is a Windows-only font. If all you want is the system's sans-serif font, try setting the font name to _sans

Answer 3

You can embed fonts in Flash.

Answer 4

Arial is the Windows version of Helvatica. DTP was invented on the Mac and Microsoft basically created their own versions of the Mac fonts sometime around Windows 3.0

Answer 5

When you use a dynamic text field, you have two options - either you embed (part of) the font into your SWF, or you use device fonts. If you embed, then the actual character shapes will be built into your SWF; if you don't, then you're including only the font's name - and if the OS doesn't have any fonts of that name, it will choose a default instead.

From your issues with the field you copied from another file, it sounds like you may have missed the "Embed" settings. Look for the button labeled "Embed settings" or similar in the Property Inspector.

If you choose to Embed, then you are guaranteed that your text will render in Arial on all platforms. However, this only holds true for the characters you embed. If you embed only the capital letters, and then set the text to "Hello", on the screen all you'll see is "H". (Be careful of embedding the entire font - for full unicode fonts that will be several megabytes, since they include Japanese and Chinese and so on.)

If you choose not to embed, then to avoid the problems you're having you should probably use one of the "device" fonts listed first in your font menu: _sans, _serif, _typewriter. In nearly all cases, these will translate to Arial, Times, and Courier on the PC, and similar fonts on the Mac.