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I just came across an annoying bug in Flash running in a browser which appears when you use PrintJob to print a TextField with embedded fonts where “anti-alias for readability” is selected… The bug manifests itself by drawing a big green box behind these TextFields.
Since a google around didn’t seem to reveal anything I thought that I would make a note of the problem and my solution (such as it is) here.

The Problem
The problem is exhibited in the swf embedded below:

When this is playing in a browser (I tried IE/PC and Firefox on Mac and PC with the Flash 9 player) and you press the print button your printout will looks something like this:

Hmmmm! Where did that big green box come from?

If you want to recreate this problem yourself you can download the files from this example here. Bear in mind that the bug doesn’t manifest itself when you are testing from the Flash IDE. I’m not sure if this is because it is a bug in the Flash 9 player or in just in the player when it is running in a browser…

The solution
Not much of a solution but as you can see in the test above this bug only bites when you are printing an embeded font which is set to “anti-alias for readability”. So the way to avoid the problem is not to select this method of anti aliasing when you are embeding fonts and printing a movieclip.

Hopefully this page will show up in google and will save someone else the hour I wasted trying to figure out what was going on!

5 Comments | In: flash | tags: bug, flash, flash8. | #

When Flash 8 came out I jumped straight on the bandwagon and started using the IDE at work. Unfortunately I quickly encountered a bug which effects you when creating an swf for an earlier version of the Flash Player. At the time I was surprised that no one else seemed to be having problems with it but I quickly forgot about it when I started working on some Flash 8 projects…

Then, the other day, Scott Fegette from Adobe posted about the problem and I suddenly remembered. And as luck would have it the next day I was working on a little Flash 6 swf and ran into the problem again. Luckily this time I saved a simple file that reproduces the problem and I’ve sent this over to Scott. He has confirmed that he can replicate the problem and forwarded it on to the product team at Adobe. In the meantime I thought that I would post here so that other people who run into the problem can find the workaround.

The Problem
The designers I work with use Illustrator. We’ve found that generally the best way to get graphic assets from Illustrator to Flash is to choose “Export” in the Illustrator file and choose swf as the format. You can then import the generated swf into Flash (and clean it up a bit).

This has always worked fine for me. Until I started using the Flash 8 IDE…

One of the new features of Flash 8 is Enhanced strokes. These are only available if you export as Flash 8. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the IDE where it will add these enhanced strokes to your project when you import an swf (even if your publish settings are already set at flash 6).

So you create a new fla and set the publish settings to Flash 6 (following best practices as outlined by Scott). You then import your Illustrator swf. Now press Ctrl-Enter to test your movie. “Enhanced stroke is not supported in this player”. D’OH!

Note that the problem is not with the swf created by Illustrator. As we shall see, you can import the same swf into an earlier version of the Flash IDE without any problems… The problem is with the import process in the Flash 8 IDE.

If you want to see this in action then you can download my simple Illustrator file and try it out.

The workaround
I have only managed to find one workaround for this problem so far. It is simple but a little annoying. Basically, you can import the Illustrator into a previous version of the Flash IDE (I still have MX2004 installed luckily). You can then save it as an fla which you can open from Flash 8 and do what you like with. No enhanced strokes. Yay!

Hopefully MacromAdobe will fix this bug in a point release – in the meantime I hope the workaround helps someone. If anyone knows any other ways of avoiding the problem then I am all ears!

33 Comments | In: flash | tags: bug, flash, flash8. | #