I had originally posted a question here: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4027591, but was told that this is more of a flash runtime issue.
I am running into issues displaying Thai characters in Flex components that make use of the Flash Text Engine (FTE), specifically on Mac OSX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.
Here's a blurb of my compiler font managers in flex-config.xml:
<flex-config>
<target-player>10.2.0</target-player>
<!-- Specifies the version of the compiled SWF -->
<swf-version>11</swf-version>
<compiler>
<!-- Specifies the locales for internationalization. -->
<locale>
<locale-element>en_US</locale-element>
</locale>
<fonts>
<!-- ... -->
<!-- Compiler font manager classes, in policy resolution order-->
<managers>
<manager-class>flash.fonts.JREFontManager</manager-class>
<manager-class>flash.fonts.BatikFontManager</manager-class>
<manager-class>flash.fonts.AFEFontManager</manager-class>
<manager-class>flash.fonts.CFFFontManager</manager-class>
</managers>
<!-- ... -->
</fonts>
</compiler>
</flex-config>
...and another from flash-unicode-table.xml:
<language-range>
<lang>Thai</lang>
<range>U+0E01-0E5B</range>
</language-range>
My flex application originally had the following defined in its stylesheet:
Application {
fontSize: 12px;
fontFamily: Arial;
font-sharpness:0;
font-anti-alias-type:advanced;
}
Thai characters render correctly in mx components such as TextField so far. However, FTE components such as TextLine show those crappy-looking boxes as a substitution. My initial guess was that somehow one of the compiler font managers declared in flex-config.xml was not finding the right system font to fallback to for Thai characters. So, I ensured the system font was installed by going to System Preferences > Language and Text > Edit List. Then I changed fontFamily to Arial, Ayuthaya. Still was seeing the boxes of evil.
Next I figured that perhaps the Arial font might be assigning a box for each unicode value corresponding to a Thai character. So it was effectively overriding the Ayuthaya system font. So I changed fontFamily once more to just Ayuthaya and this worked with one issue - Ayuthaya looks inherently different from Arial for non-thai characters.
Here's my question - is there a less invasive way to support Thai in FTE components such that the appearance of the text is closer to the Arial font? I would rather not embed a font because I'm constrained on SWF size.
Oh and I'm using flash player 10.3 right now.