Chinese localization

Question

Hi
I've been charged with internationalizing a Flash RIA, and
unluckily for me one of the locales is China. Having spent
fruitless hours trying to get just one Chinese character to
display, my only chances of an ongoing career in IT are 1) resign
and 2) beg for some help on here :-)
Text mainly comes from XML, but also from text files. There
is text in button labels, in html fields, in datagrids, in
scrolling displays. There are both input fields and static fields.
The input fields also sometimes have exclude characters. These are
all issues I anticipate, but so far I can't even get one measly
character to show up.
Here's what I'm doing:-
XML file starts with:-
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
and is saved as utf-8.
I've replaced a Latin string in the working English version
with a '是' character (may not display on this webpage, I
copied and pasted from a Chinese website).
I've imported the MingLiU font and embedded it in the swf.
I've set the universal fontFamily (affecting all fields) for
the app to MingLiU.
All I see is nothing.
I've searched the internet and this question comes up
occasionally, the advise is normally pretty simple, and Ive tried
everything.
Grateful for any ideass/pointers

Answer 1

Thanks for the replies people, though I don't think that's
it.
There are no hand-drawn anythings on the stage, our app is
written purely in actionscript, about 40,000 lines of it. Luckily
its well architected, but even so its can be a major brain ache to
work on.
I've imported and switched to other fonts, eg from Arial to
TImes to Verdana, etc, without a hitch. Its just the Chinese font
thats giving the pain.
I don't want to rely on the user's system fonts either (Ive
seen advice to go with _serif or _sans), and after setting the
default Win XP language for all programs to Chinese in the windows
settings dialogue, browsing a webpage with chinese characters
causes both IE and Firefox to crash, So embedding the font is the
only answer. MingLiU only bumped the size up 50-60K or so.
rayden chan, I think if you want to use italic or bold
characters you have to import the font seperately with bold or
italic selected, or failing that import bold/itlaic versions of the
font.
well, guess I'll keep trying.. Adobe could definitely give
more advice on this one - businesses may choose to go with AJAX /
DHTML for RIAs as China continues to grow as an important
market.