Embedded font support with Flex 4.16 and AIR 51.3.1 on iOS.

[PhilCase]

Hi Andrew,

I've been investigating an issue with embedded fonts on iOS.

I'm upgrading an iOS App to use Apache Flex 4.16 with AIR 51.3.1.
I'm currently using AIR 51.3.1 because my app does not run with later libraries (which I've reported separately).

If I follow the instructions to create a completely fresh SDK by overlaying AIR 51.3.1 onto a clean Flex 4.16 SDK, the application builds successfully, but Spark Label and RichText controls render using a serif fallback font instead of my embedded Roboto font.

During debugging I see warnings that the embedded font is incompatible because the component requires embedAsCFF=true.

With an older SDK (AIR 51.2.2.5) the application renders fonts correctly.

If I overlay AIR 51.3.1 onto a copy of that SDK, the application builds and displays as expected.

Through a process of elimination I have found that:

• Overlaying the AIR 51.3.1 toolchain onto my existing SDK produces a working application.
• Creating a clean SDK reproduces the font problem.
• The problem is resolved by restoring only the additional files from the lib directory of my older SDK.

I haven't identified the individual file responsible, but I've isolated it to the contents of the lib folder that exist in my long-upgraded SDK but not in a clean SDK.

If it would be useful, I'm happy to upload that reduced set of files to help identify the exact cause in case it helps someone else.

While researching this I noticed reports on the Starling forums that other developers experiencing problems relating to embedAsCFF=true, which is why I thought these findings might be useful.

[ajwfrost]

Hi

Thanks for the analysis here. We've seen odd things related to font embedding - sometimes even build failures that are caused by some of these libraries. I have some suspicions...

Can you please check:

Overlaying the AIR 51.3.1 toolchain onto my existing SDK produces a working application

For this SDK, if you look in the root folder of this, there should be a file flex-sdk-description.xml. Can you please confirm what the version in there is?

You mentioned that the fresh set-up, using Flex 4.16, isn't using your font; can I check whether you downloaded/installed the "optional dependencies" listed under https://flex.apache.org/download-binaries.html ? Things like afe.jar and some of those other libraries I believe are Adobe-private Java binaries that perform the conversion of the CFF font data into the "DefineFont4" tag format used in the SWF. Adobe didn't contribute those ones into the Apache project (or to us, sadly..)

So it may just be that an SDK based off Flex 4.16 will not properly support the fonts (hopefully only until those libraries are added in), but if you have an SDK based off Flex 4.6 or earlier, it should work.

thanks

[PhilCase]

Hi Andrew,

I downloaded the Apache Flex SDK from the internet without using the link on that page. I didn't know about the optional dependencies

If I reset the SDK to a clean Flex 4.16 + AIR 51.3.1 installation, test, and then copy the lib\external\optional directory (because it had most of the files you mentioned) from my "patch set":

Name	Size
afe.jar	1,337 KB
aglj40.jar	8,294 KB
flex-fontkit.jar	55 KB
rideau.jar	70 KB
swfutils.jar	468 KB

the app compiles and the embedded fonts render correctly again. If I miss out aglj40.jar and swfutils.jar it does not. (I did this because you didn't mention them).

The older SDK folder I've been using has evolved over many years (It probably originally came with Flash Builder).

Hopefully this helps confirm your suspicion.