Randomize Everything » QuickTips

Quicktip #6: Fixing the cut off character on embedded-font-textfields

Bart Claessens — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:50:42 +0000

As we all know, Flash has these crazy bugs nobody ever understands. One of those is the fact that the last character of a dynamic textfield (which has been set to “AutoSize”) gets cut off when you’re using an embedded font. Up till now I still don’t understand what kind of situation leads to this exceptional behavior. The only thing I can say is that Flash Player fails to determine the correct text length which screws up the textfield width to be shorter than it has to be.

Example:

Blurred/Cut Off Characters

A quicktip post wouldn’t be a quicktip post without a solution. So, here’s one of the tricks you might give a go: increase the rightMargin property of the TextField to a small value like 1 or 2.

var textFormat:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
textFormat.rightMargin = 1;
 
textField.antiAliasType = AntiAliasType.ADVANCED;
textField.gridFitType = GridFitType.SUBPIXEL;
textField.embedFonts = true;
textField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.CENTER;
textField.defaultTextFormat = textFormat;
textField.setTextFormat(textFormat);

Hope this helps!

Quicktip #5: int is faster than uint

Bart Claessens — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:35:59 +0000

The past few weeks I’ve been programming a scheduling component in Flash which has to be extremely performant. Every small adaption in my code that could help with limiting the processing needs is a good adaption. Today I stumbled upon a post of Grant Skinner in which he explains that using a uint is slower than a normal int. The uint’s can get five times slower than using a normal int.

So, what about the Number type? Well, I thought the Number type was a very slow type compared to the new int and uint but that also didn’t seem to be right!

Sho just posted a really interested article on why he won’t be using the int data type very frequently in ActionScript 3. Up until reading it, I had believed that as in other languages, there were large performance benefits to using ints and uints appropriately in AS3. Turns out that isn’t the case.

I did some quick testing on this, which confirm Sho’s assertion that int is only slightly faster than Number in ideal circumstances, but the results from uint were much more surprising.

Read the complete post here: gskinner.com

Quicktip #1: Casting to Number()

Bart Claessens — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:52:45 +0000

Did you know that casting a String to a Number using the ‘as’ operator returns 0 instead of the correct number? Use the Number() constructor to cast it correctly. The same applies for ‘int’ and ‘uint’.

var myNumber:String = '15';
trace("My Number: " + myNumber);
 
var castedNumber:Number = myNumber as Number;
trace("My Number (casted with 'as' operator): " + castedNumber);
 
var betterCastedNumber:Number = Number(myNumber);
trace("My Number (casted using Number() constructor): " + betterCastedNumber);
 
// Output:
// My Number: 15
// My Number (casted with 'as' operator): 0
// My Number (casted using Number() constructor): 15