wu

******************** Update: ********************

There’s now a google project for this: code.google.com/p/swfvector. I’m going to be updating this so there might be some changes to the how the whole thing works.

I had a lot of positive feedback for my last project that lets you extract font glyphs out of a swf and write text using the flash drawing API or one of the popular 3D engines.

Now, this update fixes a couple of bugs and also adds support for any vector shape on the stage or the library.

Demo:

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UPDATE: please use newer and improved version at http://wu-media.com/2009/05/extracting-vector-from-swfs-writing-and-now-drawing-with-them/

Drawing text in flash using font glyph information is definitely not new. five3D does it, PV3D uses the five3D files to do it. and Michael Baczynski also did it.

So what’s so different with my approach?

I extract the font glyphs from your SWFs, so you don’t need to go through the extra step of creating a Class that has a bunch of arrays describing your font. You can now embed fonts just as you normally would, and the best part is… you can use the same fonts with regular TextFields which lowers your overall file size.

SWF files store fonts as a bunch of ShapeRecords the same way it does with graphics youd draw on the Stage in the Flash IDE. These ShapeRecords are composed of a bunched of lineTo, moveTo, curveTo and styles instructions. For fonts we only need the first three. since we’ll be doing they styling in code when we’re about to draw text our text.

Now that we’ve extracted these ShapeRecords. I’ve created a DynamicText class that draws on a Graphics target. This target can be

1. the graphics property of a DisplayObject
2. the graphics3D property of a Shape3D in five3D
3. the graphics property of a VectorShape3D in PV3D

Sample code:

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// extract font information from swf bytes
DynamicText.extractFontInformation(root.loaderInfo.bytes, true);
// set the style
graphics.beginGradientFill(GradientType.LINEAR, [0xff4400, 0x0], [1, 1], [0x00, 0xff], m);
// draw the ext
DynamicText.write(graphics, "Futura Md BT", 20, 20, 0, "Hello World");
graphics.endFill();

Flash DisplayObject.graphics draw sample:

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