If you have fancy font with you and you think that would add value to your content or you are developing content on windows and want to target for Mac users as well or vice-versa but fear that they might not have those font on there system. What you do then? Simple, Use option Insert>Media Element>Font. Let’s call these recorded fonts as shock Font for further discussion.

How Do I Create shock font?

1. Using Menu option: Insert Menu>Media Element>Font
2. Using record font method below
   recordFont(whichCastMember, font {[,face]} {,[bitmapSizes]} {,characterSubset} {, userFontName})

Let’s check this option one by one.

Using Menu option: Insert Menu>Media Element>Font

In windows, you can record different kind of fonts like TTF, Open Type PostScript outline, Open Type True Type outline, Postscript, TTC’s. On Mac you got two options Dfonts and FFIL.

I. Go to Insert Menu>Media Element>Font. Shock font dialog will appear as shown in following figure

Fig 1. ShockFont Dialog

Let’s take look at different options in this menu one by one.

a. Font Preview: In shock font dialog at top left corner you can see preview of how actually selected font look like before you record this font.
b. Original Font: In this option from drop down you can select font you want to record. As told earlier on windows you get option to record font  for TTF, TTC, Postscript Font, OTF-T1, OTF-TT  fonts installed on your system and on Mac you can see only DFONT or FFIL installed on your system. Take a note that though you have other kind of font installed on your Mac system those fonts will not be shown in this dropdown list.

Fig 1.1 Fonts available for recording.

c. Styles: You can also record your shock font with different styles like Plain, Bold Italic, Bold, and Italic if original font you selected also has this style information. So select style as per your requirement.

 

Fig 1.2 Different styles available for selected font

d. New Font Name: This is name of the font user want to give for its new recorded font. By default this name will be font name plus asterisk added to it like “Trebuchet MS *”. Take a note that Director do not support giving name in High ASCII.
e. Select the character sets to add: In this dialog you can see on right side different scripts/Option like Latin characters, Cyrillic, Greek available for recording. Now how these scripts are populated on left side? Good Question. Director read different tables available in the original font you selected and based on that it populates this list. You if you are looking for particular kind of scripts or character set like Hiragana, CJK Ideograph, you need to select original font accordingly.

Now double click on character set you would like to add in your shock font. Remember that whatever character set you will select your recorded font will contain only those characters. Select only those character sets which are needed. Remember Size of your recorded font is directly proportional to number of characters you added. So chose wisely!!!

Fig 1.3 Selected character set appear on right side

f. Partial Characters: This option let you record only characters you wish to record. For example you just font to use character “Adobe “, why to record complete Latin characters script? Just select partial character option and give “Adobe” in partial set field.

Fig 1.4 Giving Partial characters.

g. Help: This option takes you to the help page.

Fig 1.5 Help page available for shock font

h. Cancel: This will cancel shock font dialog without recording font and will take you back to authoring.
i. OK: Once you are satisfied with your selection and all. Click OK. It will start recording font.

Fig 1.5 Font is recording.

II. Once font recoding is completed, it will create one font member in cast library with the name you chose for your new font in step d.

Fig 2 Recorded shock font in cast library

Now this recorded shock font will appear in font drop down list in text or field editor.

Fig 3 Shock font appear in Font List

Chose this font to apply to your text content.

Fig 4. Applying shock font to text.


B: Using Record Font method

If you want to record font using scripting you have this method.
recordFont(whichCastMember, font {[,face]} {,[bitmapSizes]} {,characterSubset} {, userFontName})
For more details on this method please visit the Live Docs here

Feedback:
If you have any questions or comments concerning this article, please send a message to sharad224@gmail.com