Hacking sIFR 2’s Font Replacement
With sIFR 3 still in beta, let’s explore hacking sIFR 2 to behave with more of today’s Flash functionality.
To get started, download sIFR 2. A common complaint about sIFR font replacement is that the fonts look too pixelated or light. A quick trick to fixing this is to up the Flash version from 6 to 8. Edit “sifr.js” on line 7 change “var a=6” to “var a=8” so that we’re detecting for version 8. The fonts won’t look perfect, but they will be noticeably better.
Next, we can add letter-spacing functionality to sIFR. Open up “dont_customize_me.as” (don’t worry) and place this at line 92:
if (letterSpacing != null) fmt.letterSpacing = Number(letterSpacing);
With this technique we control the letter spacing using flash vars:
sFlashVars:"otherflashvar=true&letterSpacing=2"
Finally, when you publish, make sure to export it for Flash version 8 with ActionScript 2.0. By upping both the Flash and AS versions, the font rendering gets considerably smoother.
Tags: AS2, Flash, flashvars, font-replacement, typography