No anti-aliasing?

Question

I have read that the Text Engine introduced with Flash Player 10 is supposed to provide anti-aliasing for devide fonts (i.e. non-embedded fonts).  This is essential for Web applications: without anti-aliasing text looks awful and Flex applications cannot compete with HTML applications.  But fonts that include East-Asian characters cannot be embedded because they take up too much space.  And I don't see how a Web application in 2009 can fail to support East-Asian characters.
Today I tried Flash Builder 4, and created 3 Spark components, of types RichEditableText, RichText, and SimpleText, without embedding any fonts.  All three could be rotated, which I believe means they use the new Text Engine.  But none of them had anti-aliasing (which I checked by looking at how they rendered capital letter W).  Why is this?  Do I have to do something special to get anti-aliasing?  Or is anti-aliaing a feature that will be coming later?
Thanks in advance,
Francisco

Answer 1

Hi Corey,
Thanks for your message.  I've looked more carefully at the device font I'm using on the Mac (with an LCD display).  You are right, it's anti-aliased.  (I can't see any subpixel colorations with my magnifying glass as I can see them on Windows, but maybe they are just less obvious.) 
So the reason the device font looks ugly on the Mac must just be the letter spacing.  Since you said it looks good to you, I checked the code and did some experimentation.  It turns out that I'm saying fontFamily="_sans" and, surprisingly, in Flex 3, this it not the same as not assigning a value to fontFamily.  (Out of curiosity I checked Flex 4, and it is the same there.)  Saying fontFamily="_sans" causes the letter spacing to be way off.  If I don't say anything the spacing it still a bit off, but not too much, and the font does not look bad, although it still does not look as good as an embedded font.
I tried taking screen shots, but they come out a little blurry and it's hard to judge fonts on them.  But I'm attaching a simple mxml file that compares the embedded font, the device font with no assignment to fontFamily, and the device font with fontFamily="_sans".
If you want to see the huge difference that fonts make on the application, the best thing is to look at the application itself, so I should say what it is.  It's Noflail Search, a search engine that you can find at noflail.com.  It starts out using an embedded font, but if it encounters an East-Asian character, or you specifiy an East-Asian language restriction, or you turn on an IME for an East-Asian language, it switches to fontFamily="_sans" (and lets you know that it does).  To go back to the embedded font you can remove what caused the switch and reload the page.  So it's easy to compare the effect of the two fonts.
The switching to the device font was my clumsy attempt at coping with the East-Asian character problem.  Unfortunately the switching happens fairly often, because East-Asian characters pop-up in results when you least expect it, even if the query has nothing to do with East-Asia.  So I will remove the "feature" soon, and just use device fonts and hope that most Windows users have ClearType enabled.  But I'll leave it on all day Monday in case you want to check out the effect of the fonts on the application.
When I said that Adobe should not rely on embedded fonts I was referring to the fact that the nice anti-aliasing and text rendering that you have in Flex 3, and the presumably nicer one in Flex 4, is only available for embedded fonts.
Btw I've been comparing the subpixel anti-aliasing that I get with ClearType and a device font on Windows to the embedded font, and the embedded font looks definitely better.  The device font with ClearType looks purplish, and the anti-aliasing does not seem as good.  So let me emphasize that I'm not arguing that Adobe should use subpixel anti-aliasing.  I'm arguing that the grey-scale anti-aliasing and text rendering that you use for embedded fonts should be used for device fonts as well.  Is there any technical reason that makes this difficult?  Impossible?
Thanks for listening
Francisco