It’s time to speak about a problem that’s been troubling me for quite a while now. Flash CS4 (and certainly versions that precede it) seems to have major problems consistently and accurately rendering text. I’ve prepared some screen captures that demonstrate the problem.

Text Field Properties

It all begins innocently enough. I’ve created a text field on the stage and I move over to the properties panel to toy with it. In this case, the text field uses Arial Regular at 12 points as its font. It’s anti-aliased for readabilty, and it’s selectable.

Embedded Characters

Although I don’t expect that any of my viewers will be without Arial, I embed the font all the same. I make a broad selection of characters that should cover most if not all of my use cases for this text field, without embedding everything.

Editing Text

Now that I’ve configured my text field, I select it on the stage and put in some standard lorem ipsum to test my application with. Everything up to this point seems fine…

How Text Renders

…until I finish editing the text. Now that I have it selected, but am no longer editing it, everything has changed. Compare this screen capture to the one that precedes it.

This problem is not new. It’s particularly pernicious when you’re trying to align other objects with on-screen text.