Flash font support is atrocious
From dis-Emi-A
Flash is supposed to be a general purpose interactive presentation, or new media technology. I was initially then quite shocked to find out that the font support is downright abysmal -- I was able to do more with fonts with Borland's C compiler for DOS!
I can think of three significant shortcomings of the Flash font system -- all of which are addressed in normal graphics APIs even as of 10 years ago. The average Flash designer may not recognize this however since the Flash development environment cleverly changes all text into graphics before actually producing the SWF file. That is of course only useful if all your text is known beforehand: absolutely nothing is dynamic or loaded.
No rotation
The moment a text control is rotated the text is no longer displayed. There is no genuine reason for this since all the host platforms for Flash have supported this for a very long time.
It of course goes without saying then that there is absolutely no kind of form, slant, or distortion control for text. The right/left alignment don't ever work correctly.
Limited/impossible sizing
The specification for a font size seems to be limited to the range of 1-128 specified as an integer. There are no partial sizes, and nothing above that range. On a typical desktop the maximum size would only be about 15% of the entire screen.
The fractional sizes is also sad since we are dealing mainly with vector graphics. Each layer, or node in the display tree, can have different scalings, many of which will scale the font to partial amounts. Without these partial amounts the text is often just not the right size.
On top of all this is Flash's reporting of the extents of the text -- the final size of the rendered text. In some cases you can possibly determine the full size of a text control, but in many cases you can't really know until after it has been rendered. This makes dynamic layout of text quite difficult.
No host size
The last annoyance, and possibly the least, but still quite troublesome, is that it is impossible to determine how large the standard size font the user of the machine has. So you can't ever really know if the text your are displaying is too large, or too small.
