If I embed icons in the CSS file and refer to the style name in action script code, is that a good practice? Will that increase the swf size?
Any help would be really appreciated.
Thanks,
Gurjaspal
Yes, whatever way you choose, the font face will be embedded inside the SWF file.
Two ways to limit file size when using embedded fonts are :
Include only the needed character range. See this page for more information.
You can embed fonts in the main application and reference them in other parts of the application that are loaded later on (modules or their stylesheets)
Yes... Embed away. Flex has many built in compression algorithms that do a fantastic job of reducing file size. I've tried to optimize this process myself when building for web delivery and ultimately I could not get the file any smaller than flex could embedding the assets natively.
EDIT:
My assumption on adding this second answer is you were asking about icons (imagery) and not fonts.
Related
next month google will stop flash ads automatically, so we got a lot of requests to remake our flash banners in html.
The IAB made 2013 some guidelines for html5 banners. The maximum file size should be 100kb..
We're using 2 ways to publish our banners. One is with google doubleclick and the other one is direct publishing on websites.
We got no problem with doubleklick, because they say, that the initial load should be under 100kb and the rest could be loaded after that.
But the publishers for the direct publishing are saying, that the whole banner (all files which are used and compressed as a zip) should be max. 100kb.
Our client has got some designing guidelines, so we have to include the font (which contains 4 formats and 2 font types). But even the font has 400kb.
So the only way we have at the moment is, to convert the text into pictures, to keep the filesize down.. But this isn't the concept of html5...
DOes someone of you got a solution for that problem ?? :O
Thanks
Use doubleClick, because dealing with publisher directly will make you crazy. They don't know about polite loading and are very strict on the file sizes, but when you use doubleClick you can use Polite load Options.
About the typefaces, if you want to put some copies on the website it is better to generate png for that and optimize those png with software like imageOptim.
This way each Copy will be around 1Kb.
But the whole webfont is around 100KB which does not make sence to add in one banner.
Beside first check available free webfonts that you can use without adding any extra weight on the banner.
About the webfonts, you could use Google Fonts and limit by char used.
For instance, if the text is "Hello" only 4 chars is included (H e l o).
And I agree with Majid Kalkatechi, use DFP and Polite loading.
With DoubleClick you will need to host your fonts on https, they won't be included in the file size limit. They might impact performance of the ad unit, loading in later, which will mean webfonts will show temporarily.
Why are you using fonts and not images? Are the ads using dynamic text? If not use images. Normally keeping an ad under 100kb shouldn't be a problem
I have seen lots of questions related to font embedding in flash and I can't seem to find an answer to my problem.
I load fonts from a font swf and register them at a high level so that they can be used in child swfs. The issue is the child swf might also embed these fonts, but not explicitly so, meaning they are only embedded because there are fields in the child swf that use certain characters of a font. This means the text fields in the child use the incomplete embedded font instead of the embedded complete set that is registered in the parent or any level of grandparent. Also this means the swfs that may become children of this child won't get the complete font.
My question:
Is there any way to tell flash at compile to not embed, under any circumstances, fonts into a swf? If not is there a tool that removes embedded fonts from a compiled swf?
Here's a few things I have given thought to/noticed so far:
It seems as if each Font class is tied to an ApplicationDomain. ( Confirmation of this would be helpful )
Using device fonts on text fields will not cause any fonts to embed. ( Not an option for me however because I need the fields to embed fonts at runtime from a parent swf. )
I can't find a way to unregister fonts or simply tell loaded child swfs to use parent fonts, which would be useful to apply to the loaded child swfs.
It may be possible to load the child in a different context that would allow parent definitions of a fonts to override the child definitions. ( Or would there be two definitions and if so which one takes priority? )
Loading assets from the library of the child and adding them to the stage will get the parent definition of the font. ( this makes sense because the asset is created outside the domain of the child )
A possible solution might be to not add any characters to the textfields for compile of the swf, but this isn't really an option either because I need static text using any font.
I've started forming a definition of what the problem is in my mind that may be incorrect, so please if necessary take a few steps back and give me a different perspective on the problem. So far it seems like the question I asked above is the right question to answer and if there is a solution to it, all my problems go away.
Thanks!
If I am right in understanding, than you want to remove/unregister all fonts that are not that complete as the version of this specific font that was already loaded, but embedded in another swf?
Every Font that is embedded creates a class, every swf you load via the Loader class is by default loaded in its own application domain, to prevent namespace clashes, but you can force the loader to load everything into the current application domain with the »loader context« parameter of the Loader's load() method. So this way you could try to force to override classes in the same namespace with each other, but than you cannot control which class to throw away, means you cannot check which font has more glyphs. (maybe it just throws errors instead of overriding and doesn't run at all, i am not that sure about this).
On the other hand you should question how fonts are actually embedded in the child's swf-files. I know no other way than to embed fonts as:
in *.fla-files as »library symbol«,
or in code of flashbuilder or flex like this:
[Embed(source="c:/windows/fonts/verdana.ttf", fontFamily="Verdana", embedAsCFF="false")],
or this:
#font-face {
src: url("../assets/MyriadWebPro.ttf");
fontFamily: myFontFamily;
advancedAntiAliasing: true;
}
in mxml files. So the (that is what I guess) the resulting Name of the class that is generated depends on the »font-family« property (or even more settings) given by the developer, means even if the same font is embedded twice the class-name might differ caused through the settings.
Also there is no Font.unregisterFont() method, so how to manage this stays a good question, just in case that you might find the same Font class somehow (perhaps RegExp becomes a friendly helper).
I think to solve this properly you need control at compile time, using xml based *.xfl project files might help but even than the referenced Font-File can have a different Name.
A nice problem, good luck
I had a lot of problems using fonts with flash. It is still a problem on html with different browsers rendering in different ways.
Anyways, for flash, I built this toolkit that helps me a lot. Check how to customize your fonts. If you do the steps I am pretty sure the problem will be solved.
https://github.com/tbwa/AS3-Toolkit/tree/master/src/com/utils/text
Turns out this is an bug with my version of Flash Professional. I did an update and runtime shared fonts are now possible. I will probably point the shared font at a bad url for the fonts then the fonts will come from the parent application domain because they aren't compiled into the child swfs. I'm using Flash Professional CS5.5 11.5.1 now. I was using CS5.5 11.5.0.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3926344
Thanks Adobe for wasting my time.
So we have a component we have written ourselves that deals with text display and translation between languages, reading translations from a file. Ideally what we would like to do is have this component be compatible with any font we can embed in the main .swf's library. What's the best way to do that?
Currently we are going down the route of having our component have an attribute for the font name, lets say 'Font1'. We drag the component into the .FLA file we want and then add a new font to the library called 'Font1' and set it to the typeface we want. This is proving to be inconsistent and problematic which implies it's not really an ideal way of doing it.
Is there anyway to achieve the feature we want? The key is flexibility, we want to easily support languages (hence the component) but we don't want design to be limited in their font selection. Its not practical to embed a range of fonts in the component for example, as it adds to file size and is restrictive.
Any ideas or solutions to this much appreciated. The component is written in AS3 and we are using Flash CS4.
Look into Runtime font loading or runtime font embedding.
There are many ways to deal with this depending on your development environment. In that regard, FlashBuilder may offer you more flexibility than Flash CS4 actually.
A general approach could be to have a set of SWFs file, each embedded with a particular font. Of course, these SWFs shouldn't be loaded at start up.
When calling a font in your component, you would practically call a function that would load the corresponding SWF, adding the font to your Application Domain, therefore making it available to your component.
Here's an article that may help in clarifying the process
http://nochump.com/blog/archives/20
but a Google search such as Runtime font loading or embedding should bring out a lot more resources.
Hope this helps!
I was just wondering what are the pros and cons of using embedded images instead of dynamic loading? Because when making games on pure AS3 (without Flash IDE), its a pain to manually embed all the assets needed... That makes your code sloppy, besides you don't have control to automatically change the hud, for example, by only changing the external file.
But I heard that some sites only let you upload a single swf, so you can't have external images. Also I heard that some are worried about users downloading their art... But as far as I know, and please correct if I'm wrong, they can also download them if they hack the swf with a decompiler. Having it external, you can encrypt the image, and unencrypt it on the code, so if they try to download they will only get encrypted code.
So... What do you think about embedding images? Please share all your thoughts to me.
I believe dynamic loading of images is a better approach. I agree with you about the game problem you stated, but when you are talking of flash/as3 as a whole, games are just one of the things among the many, you do. Also there are a few which also accept multiple files & maybe more will allow later. As of now hosting sites are just being on the safe side by not allowing multiple files & formats. So if you really have additional files you could just host them elsewhere & call them from your main swf.
I however cant agree about the point of making the code sloppy by managing images dynamically. When you do it through an IDE the IDE is writing the code for you, but as you might realize letting an IDE decide what to write doesn't always make the best. Manually handling things let's you understand all entry & exit points of an app. Moreover, would you want to open a flash IDE every time you wish to add an image, make an update, etc.
I usually like to use IDE cause of the awesome tools it provides to make things more efficient & prefer letting the code do all management/control stuff.And yes, if you have many small images (as in online flash games), embedding is better approach.
As far as the security is concerned even externally loaded files can be accessed if the encryption algorithm you use, can be found by decompiling the swf. So your best bet in case of security is usually using a third party software to encrypt the swf, which let's say increases your chance to prevent theft of your material. So if you really encrypt the swf using a 3rd party tool, both the ways would be acceptable.
I believe both approaches are valid, it mainly depends on your assets.
As you know embedding assets, will increase the size of your swf, I would only consider doing this for icon type images where size is hardly an issue.
For bigger images, I would definitely go for dynamic loading which I also find more flexible.
If I have lots of small icons, I'm embedding them. Imagine that number of requests in runtime, any of which may timeout. Pain of embedding, where? A single Embed tag in source or CSS for an asset. "Constant" assets must be embedded, "variable" ones - loaded.
Edit: OK, I got it. Pain of embedding lots of assets. Here is one idea come to my mind... Even if you loading something dynamically, you need some list with all filenames? You may take list of files and generate class full of public static const members with [Embed] attributes, that's fairly trivial. Then you use that class in project and voila, all is in the place. Maybe this helps.
Are there any tips / best practices / secrets for optimizing the size of AS3 SWF files? In particular, any way to get a breakdown of what is taking up space inside the SWF, like you used to be able to in the old Flash 7/8 days? I'm not using the Flash IDE any more, but now I'm using either Flex Builder or FlashDevelop, so it needs to be something that I can do without the Flash IDE.
If you're interested what in the code is taking up space, you can get that information from the link report. It's not as detailed as what you can get out of the Flash IDE, but it shows the size of each class (uncompressed.)
To create a link report, use the -link-report <filename> flag on mxmlc. It creates an XML file with information about the classes linked into your SWF.
I used the .XSL file described in the link below to clean it up and make it more readable:
http://blog.iconara.net/2007/02/25/visualizing-mxmlcs-link-report/
One tip would be to try Joa Ebert's "Reducer" tool which can greatly reduce the size of any PNG files in your SWF if you used the embed tag.
http://blog.joa-ebert.com/2009/08/08/reducer/
Make sure, you use PNG-8 where it is possible and PNG-24 where you need alpha-channel.
Use pngout tool to optimize them.
And there are some tools that can obfuscate and optimize SWF files.
I'm not sure what can be done with Flex Builder or FlashDevelop but what I always watch out for is font embedding. I take care to embed only the characters which will definately be used in the final swf.
Hi I previously posted this link in a related question about link report analysis (here), I've used this in the past and its quite a nice tool
LinkReportAIR