Autodesk Scaleform ships with a flexible font system that provides high-quality transformable text with HTML formatting. Using the font system, fonts can be substituted for localization and taken from different sources, including locally embedded text, shared GFX/SWF files, operating system font data or the FreeType 2 library. The font rendering quality has also been significantly improved, allowing developers to trade off between animation performance, memory use and readability of text.
Many of the Scaleform font features rely on the functionality inherent in Flash® Studio, including the ability to embed font character sets into SWF files and to utilize system fonts when they are available. However, Flash Studio is primarily tailored to developing individual files and thus has limited font localization capabilities. In particular, Flash does not allow embedded fonts or translation tables to be easily shared across files, a feature that is critical for efficient memory use and game asset development. Furthermore, Flash relies on the operating system to handle font substitution of international characters that are not embedded in the file, which is not an option on game consoles where system fonts are not available.
Scaleform addresses these issues by using the GFx::Translator class as a centralized callback for all translatable text and the GFx::FontLib class for dynamic font mapping. Additional interfaces are provided to control the caching mechanism used for fonts, to substitute font names during localization, and to enable operating system and FreeType 2 font lookup when applicable.
In order to effectively use the Scaleform font system, developers need to understand the font features of both Flash Studio and Scaleform runtime. Knowing the Flash side will allow artists to develop consistent-looking content that can render efficiently with the desired quality, while minimizing the memory use. Understanding the Scaleform font runtime options will allow developers to select a configuration that has the best possible quality, performance and memory use characteristics for a given platform.
This document is designed to teach developers that are not intimately familiar with Flash and Scaleform the ins and outs of Game UI font setup. The remainder of the introduction is organized as follows: