Li : Dev Actionscript Development Blog

Dynamic TrueTypeFont Parsing

The Away3D textfields branch can now parse ttf files dynamically. You can use TTF.as to parse fonts embedded as byte data or to load and parse external font files at runtime:

[Embed(source="assets/Arial.ttf", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]

private var ArialEmbedded:Class;

var rawData:ByteArray = new ArialEmbedded();

var font:FontData = TTF.parse(rawData, "abcdef...");

or,

var font:FontData = TTF.load("assets/Arial.ttf", "abcdef...");

The TTF class uses a very compact true type font parser that should be able to handle simple ttf files for now, and is intended to be expanded in the future to support files with more complex data, such as different encoding types, compound characters etc.

If the dynamic parser cant handle a complex parsing case, you can use the FontExporter from my previous post to generate a font class. This alternative uses the Flash IDE's font parser which can parse any font. Its takes a little more work, but its flawless.

Click on the image to see a demo of 3 different Arial font usages with TextField3D; using the FontExporter, using the TTF.parse() method or the TTF.load() method. Right click to see the source.

Hope these tools makes the branch easier to use.

SVN: http://away3d.googlecode.com/svn/branches/textfields/src/away3d/