Flash / unicode in Flash

Unicode in Flash 5 and MX

First, Flash 5

Back in Flash 5 times, they used to say "you can't have unicode in Flash". As a developer who has to create content in other character sets than default, I was somewhat dismayed being offered to work with text as images. Sure, there are some ways to deal with it: For example, I could create a movieclip containing all glyphs in separate frames, then create a class that's taking my string, tokenizing it, and then by duplicating the glyph movieclip would print out the text. But that seemed to be pretty odd way though. Thus, I developed a more standard-way how to get those dynamic textfields display text in international language. Note that I am discussing only the text visualisation problem here: there are whole bunch of other issues if you are looking for dynamic loading of text either via loadVars or XML load.

Here below, you can see my proposed solution for Flash 5 on Windows 95/98 PC. Windows NT/2000/XP have different approach for saving font substitutes, look for registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes. Unfortunately I dont have resources to test it so you may want to update me un how successful you are on these OSes.

Now, Flash MX

Flash MX introduces an understanding of unicode concept. The support is still somewhat spotty, because developer can not choose between different encodings of text sources.
Here are some links to have a taste of what unicode support Flash MX offers:
Macromedia: Unicode in Macromedia Flash MX
A good tutorial I've found about this

Downloads

unicode.zip - A package for Flash 5 solution.