We here at squidder have created the FontSWFCreator in response to a problem that we often run into working our projects — embedding fonts within flash.

There are really two schools of thought on this:

1. You can just use the “embed characters” on your dynamic/input text fields and have that be it. This is what folks do 99% of the time. But what happens if you’re doing a site for multiple languages? Well, if it is only for languages that use roman characters, you’re probably in the clear. But what if you also have to support Russian, Polish or Japanese? You could create multiple swfs for those countries, but where’s the fun in that?

2. Use Flex to create font swfs that can be loaded in. Why Flex? Because you can control what characters you can embed exactly — Flash, you’ve got embed the whole slew of characters if you’re going to do files that can be loaded in. And, in the case of Japanese, that can be many many MBs of swf-y goodness. The only downside to that is you now have to touch every dynamic field via actionscript — i.e. go through and actually set the text format you want. A pain, for sure, but not as bad as making multiple swfs, especially if you plan ahead.

But man is making those swf files in Flex a pain in the ass! You’ve got to create the as file, find the font you want and then go through the process of figuring out all the unicode values of the characters you want to embed.

So that’s why we’ve been working on SWFFontCreator for OS X 10.5.

It’s really just a glorified mxmlc command line wrapper. Basically, it creates a .as file for you and then passes that into the command line compiler, saving you some extra steps.

THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW:

1. We’re terrible actionscript programmers, which can only mean that we’re even worse Cocoa developers. Combine that with the fact that this is our first pass at Cocoa dev (besides some ill fated iPhone apps), chances are this app will make your computer explode. This is pre-alpha at best.

2. You need the flex sdk, specifically the “mxmlc” program (not the “.exe” one).

3. See the actionscript file it compiles for reference to how it works. All you should need to is load this swf into your movie and the font should become accessible!

4. Download it here (v0.1)!

There are no change logs, no icons, nothing — app distribution at it’s worst. But if you are brave enough to give it a try, please give us feedback and we’ll try to improve it as time goes on!

Planned features:
- Preset character sets (similar to embed panel functionality in flash)
- Ability to search through xml files/directories and get characters that need to be embedded.