Potentially confusing post warning!

At my job, I often have to work with font embedding. Often, that just happens in Flash IDE as part of assets exported to a swc. Not only because it’s convenient sometimes, but also because I’ve found embedding through Actionscript behaves… well… strange occasionally, especially when using thin or extra light fonts. Just now in fact, I encountered an interesting situation in which this was definitely the case. The font in question is an extra light OpenType font.

I created a static class FontManager, that embeds all the necessary fonts for the project, and also provides a shortcut function to assign the fonts to a TextField. So the setup (let’s call it Setup A) was as follows:

• ViewClass – _textField: TextField
• FontManager [static] – Embedded fonts + setFontFormat(textField : TextField, fontFamily : String);

The embedding happened in the usual way. Straight away, the first problem was that the text was rendered too bold. Messing around with anti-aliasing didn’t help one but, until – randomly – it rendered correctly. Afterwards, I changed the GridFitType: back to bold! Oddly enough, reverting to the old “correct” version didn’t fix anything.

After some messing about, I decided to embed the font in the same class as the TextField (still using the shortcut function in the separate class). The new setup B:

• ViewClass – _textField: TextField + Embedded font
• FontManager [static] – setFontFormat(textField : TextField, fontFamily : String);

Now it was thinner than it had ever been! Actually, it was exactly how the font should be When reverting back to Setup A to find out what happened, the text wasn’t rendered as bold anymore. A bit thicker, yes, but not nearly as much. See the inset image for a better comparison.

Funnily, I can’t actually reproduce the original bold version anymore! Some behaviours seem completely random, and some perhaps seem to be related to namespace issues (??).

I’m really confused about what’s going on; this way, it’s really hard to create some centralised form of font management in a font-heavy project. I’d be happy if anyone could shed some light on this issue (or non-issue after all?)