How to use special characters

This is the solution for using different types of characters/languages in our products with embedded fonts. You will need Adobe Flash Professional to follow the instructions below.

If you don't have Adobe Flash Professional and if the component allows it, you can use non-embedded fonts and you don't need these instructions as they should work with any type of character. To use non-embedded fonts you have to change the value of embedFonts attribute to false in your settings.xml file (some products have multiple embedFonts attributes so make sure all of them are set to false).

Step 1:

Edit the images.xml file with a text editor (a regular editor would be Notepad++) and set the format of the XML file to UTF-8. In Notepad++, from the menu, Format -> Encode in UTF-8. Type your text in CDATA tags for each image (in your UTF-8 formatted language) and Save the file.

For the second step, there are two possibilities:
- if you’re using any font other than the one already embedded in the component (like Arial and/or Verdana - depending on each component), go for Step 2A
- if you’re using the already embedded font go for Step 2B

Step 2A:

In the FLA file create an empty text field on the Stage using Text Tool (put it anywhere just make sure it’s outside the viewable area). Click on (select) this newly created text field on the Stage and go to Properties panel (Ctrl+F3) and select a font which you know it contains all the special characters you need. Click Embedding and select (using Ctrl+Click) all the character types you need (note that each selection increases little by little the SWF size).

Step 2B:

Open the Library (Ctrl+L), right clik on an empty space on the Library, select New Font, write Arial or Verdana for Name and Font, check Export for ActionScript, then write Arial or Verdana (the same as before) for the Identifier. Click OK.

Note: for Step 2B you’ll have to know that if you’ll be using rare characters, like Cyrillic, you won’t be able to see them, and you’ll have to go for Step 2A and use other fonts than Arial or Verdana. For Latin characters for example it won’t be a problem.

Step 3 for components having the font customizable through XML:

Edit the settings.xml file, and put the name of your font as the value for fontFace (note that it could differ from one component to another), like this

<fontFace value="your_font" />

Step 3 for components having the font customizable through CSS:

Edit the style.css file and write the name of your font for the font-family (you might want to put it twice, for both head and body), like this:

font-family: your_font;