Specifications

69ADOBE FLEX 3

Building and Deploying Adobe Flex 3 Applications

Using character ranges for embedded fonts

By specifying a range of symbols that compose the face of an embedded font, you reduce the size of an embedded

font. Each character in a font must be described; if you remove some of these characters, it reduces the overall size

of the description information that Flex must include for each embedded font.

You can set the range of glyphs in the flex-config.xml file or in the

font-face declaration in each MXML file. You

specify individual characters or ranges of characters using the Unicode values for the characters, and you can set

multiple ranges for each font declaration.

In CSS, you can set the Unicode range with the

unicodeRange property, as the following example shows:

@font-face {

src:url("../assets/MyriadWebPro.ttf");

fontFamily: myFontFamily;

unicodeRange:

U+0041-U+005A, /* Upper-Case [A..Z] */

U+0061-U+007A, /* Lower-Case a-z */

U+0030-U+0039, /* Numbers [0..9] */

U+002E-U+002E; /* Period [.] */

}

In the flex-config.xml file, you can set the Unicode range with the <language-range> block, as the following

example shows:

<language-range>

<lang>Latin I</lang>

</language-range>

For more information, see “Using Fonts” on page 653 in the Adobe Flex 3 Developer Guide.

Using multiple SWF files

One way to reduce the size of an application’s file is to break the application up into logical parts that can be sent

to the client and loaded over a series of requests rather than all at once. By breaking a monolithic application into

smaller applications, users can interact with your application more quickly, but possibly experience some delays

while the application is running.

One approach is to use the SWFLoader control. This technique can work with SWF files that add graphics or

animations to an application, or SWF files that act as stand-alone applications inside the main application. If you

import SWF files that require a large amount of user interaction, however, consider building them as custom

components. SWF files produced with earlier versions of Flex or ActionScript may not work properly when

loaded with the SWFLoader control.