Category Archives: AS3

Posts related to ActionScript 3.0

Embed tag gotchas in Flex SDK 4

In moving to compiling projects with the new Flex SDK 4, I noticed a couple of gotchas to do with the EMBED metatag that I thought I’d share:

Runtime Shared Libraries
If you wish to embed assets in your SWF with the EMBED metatag, so you can manage and update things easily, there’s an extra compiler parameter you must add, in order for your project to compile properly:

--static-link-runtime-shared-libraries=true

This is already added as a new default parameter in FlashDevelop projects. But if you’re planning to build projects from outside a similar IDE, you must add this to your compiler string. Otherwise, the compiler will think you have uninitialised constants and warn you so.

Embedding Fonts
Using the EMBED metatag, or even better runtime loading, for fonts is the sensible way forward. The amount of projects I’ve seen where you need to build from an FLA file full of fonts, which you need to hunt down and install is crazy. With Flex SDK 4, you’ll need to add an extra attribute to your embed tag for fonts, called ’embedAsCFF’:

[Embed(source='myfont.ttf', fontName='MY_FONT', fontWeight='regular', unicodeRange='U+0020-U+0040,U+0041-U+005A', mimeType='application/x-font', embedAsCFF='false')]
public static const MY_FONT :Class;

Happy compiling!

FlashSize – simple browser resizing

How to allow SWFs to display at 100% width/height in your browser – but enforce a minimum width and height, in case of a smaller browser window size than you’ve designed for.

Until recently, I’d used other Flash/browser resize managers when I needed to ensure a SWF is embedded in HTML at 100% width and height, but with support for a minimum width and height setting. But I recently needed a solution the didn’t depend on external JavaScript, due to not having control of the page the SWF is embedded in.

With my simple FlashSize script, all you need do is call:

import com.spikything.utils.FlashSize;
FlashSize.setup(minWidth, minHeight);