Flash Site Design - Text missing from Flash file

Author

Text missing from Flash file

kmdesart

2006-04-04, 6:36 pm

I just uploaded my portfolio and friends told me that the text is missing from
the pages. She looked it up on her laptop. I checked it out at my work station,
and everything is fine. I looked up help topics related to this subject, and
the only thing I found was to embed my text. Is this the answer to my problem?
My site is at: www.desartdesigns.net if you want to check it out, see if it
works on your browser. Thank you in advance for any help with this problem!

tralfaz

2006-04-04, 6:36 pm

"kmdesart" <webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote in message news:e0u9he$rvd$1@forums.macromedia.com...
>I just uploaded my portfolio and friends told me that the text is missing from
> the pages. She looked it up on her laptop. I checked it out at my work station,
> and everything is fine. I looked up help topics related to this subject, and
> the only thing I found was to embed my text. Is this the answer to my problem?
> My site is at: www.desartdesigns.net if you want to check it out, see if it
> works on your browser. Thank you in advance for any help with this problem!

I don't know where the missing text was but I didn't see anyplace that looked like it had text missing.
This problem usually comes from using the wrong kind of text.. dynamic instead of static.
Only use dynamic text where the text needs to be changed by Actionscript. If the text is unchanging, use static text.
If you do need dynamic text, embed the font outline for it unless it is a common font that everyone has. If you use a rare font,
only people that have that font will see it (that's probably what you are experiencing now)
If you switch all your unchanging text to static, then you don't need to embed font outlines for those.

Suggestion for improvement.. don't have a 4 megabyte entry way into your website. Your server was very slow and it took a long time
to load, even with my very fast connection.
If you make a smaller "front door", get the visitor into the site where they can see something enough to hold their interest while
the bigger stuff loads. Only hold up the navigation of your site for those things that are essential right now. For example, if you
are looking at painting number 1 and painting number 2,3,4,5 are already loaded, you don't need to block the visitor from moving to
image 2,3,4,5 because image number 6,7 and 8 etc are still loading. You just need a scheme where the visitor can move through the
site to any place that is loaded already.

hope that helps,
tralfaz

kmdesart

2006-04-04, 6:36 pm

Thanks for the response and the suggestion. Being a new Flash user I really
didn't think about loading times. What would I do to make the file smaller? The
issue is that the entire Flash file loads at once. Would I make several Flash
files and link them together? Can you even do that? I need to read more on this
topic, you don't need to feel obligated to hold my hand throughout the process!
I thank you for your assistance however :)

tralfaz

2006-04-04, 6:36 pm

"kmdesart" <webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote in message news:e0ud7a$3q6$1@forums.macromedia.com...
> Thanks for the response and the suggestion. Being a new Flash user I really
> didn't think about loading times. What would I do to make the file smaller? The
> issue is that the entire Flash file loads at once. Would I make several Flash
> files and link them together? Can you even do that? I need to read more on this
> topic, you don't need to feel obligated to hold my hand throughout the process!
> I thank you for your assistance however :)

When web sites have natural sectional qualities to them you can use that to make each section a separate swf file, like photo.swf,
art.swf, etc.
Those other swfs can be loaded into movieclips or into levels into the main swf without holding back the other sections. Since you
are pretty new to Flash that's not an easy thing to sort out, I know. There is so much to learn with Flash, it can be
overwhelming.

I decompiled your swf file just to see how it's laid out. The pictures are the great majority of the file size and getting them out
of the swf file would be the best way to get the swf file size down, and then to load those from the server as needed (or
continually in the background without restricting the rest of the site). since that would be such a major design change to your
site, I realize it's not a good solution for you right now. When you are ready for that you can look up tutorials for dynamic photo
slide shows that load images from disk rather than embedding them into the swf file.

One thing that I noticed was that many of your photos only show a part of the image and the rest is cut off from view. If you can
crop your photos in a photo editor before importing into Flash to the size you will see then you can drop those file sizes down a
lot. One of those pictures is 544kbytes! You could allow more jpeg compression to get the file sizes down without losing much
image quality. It's a shame that the entire image can't be seen though. They are really good. (art and pictures too)

tralfaz

kmdesart

2006-04-04, 6:36 pm

Thank you so much for your help. I had gotten the same response from a few
people I have asked (to pre-crop my photos in photoshop instead of just masking
the areas in flash)...Yeah, that makes perfect sense and I don't know why I
didn't do that before!

So about the seperate swf files...Would I create a main swf file (ex:
"portfolio") and several more swf files ("photos", "art", "logos", etc.) and
load them as movie clips in the main swf file? Or would I just leave them
seperate and have buttons that link them together? I sound confused because I
am...

Further down the line, I'll put a link to a full page image instead of just
the cropped panoramic view. I like the look of the wide format, but I too would
like to be able to show more of the artwork.

Thanks again for your comments!

dex002

2006-04-04, 10:31 pm

Originally posted by: kmdesart

So about the seperate swf files...Would I create a main swf file (ex:
"portfolio") and several more swf files ("photos", "art", "logos", etc.) and
load them as movie clips in the main swf file? Or would I just leave them
seperate and have buttons that link them together? I sound confused because I
am...

Hey man, yeah Newsgroup User is right. Probably the best way for you to avoid
the big main swf is to break it up into smaller ones. So you create a main swf
that has the main navigation buttons on it but very little else, so it loads
real fast. Then each nav button loads the corresponding external swf. Its
important to do this so that users aren't downloading a bunch of stuff that
they may not even be interested in. You can fairly easily add a preloader to
each external swf too, so when a user clicks on a nav button, the preloader
pops up instantly and show the user that the swf they're waiting for is on its
way. There's a few ways to do this.

Here's a really great tutorial by Lee Brimlow on doing this. Go to
http://www.gotoandlearn.com and watch the video called "External SWF
Preloading".

Cheers, Matt

kmdesart

2006-04-04, 10:31 pm

Oh, and by the way, I am using static text. The only dynamic text I'm using is
for the preloader info. Like I said, it loaded correctly onto my work station,
but other people have had problems viewing the text. The picture elements were
there, as I understand from what was explained to me, but even the text buttons
at the bottom did not show up. Link to site is on top post.

(Still going to fix the size issue though)...

dex002

2006-04-04, 10:31 pm

yeah, the site is very nice. I'm not sure what text is missing either so I
can't help you there. But please, PLEASE, break it up in to smaller pieces. I
would have the gallery home page included in the main swf, but load each
gallery section (photos, art, 3d etc) in from external swf.

Cheers, Dex.

kmdesart

2006-04-04, 10:31 pm

Thank you for your comments and for looking into my site! Just uploaded it last
night...

I will fix the size issue...lol. Thanks :)

The font used is Lucida Sans Unicode. I thought that was a standard font. I
really don't want to change it to like Arial or something, but do you think
that would fix the problem?

dex002

2006-04-04, 10:31 pm

You shouldn't have to change the font. If the textfields are static, the fonts
will be embedded into the swf so it doesn't matter whether the user has lucinda
sans on their machine or not. Are you abolutely sure the textfields are static?

Shane Dale

2006-04-04, 10:31 pm

I'm having same problem with Univers font. Only Mac users can't see my text,
and that's only a few of the mac users at that! I can't figure it out. Its all
static text, and I even put a dynamic text block out of view and have that
embedding the font. Who knows.... I'm loosing money trying to figure it out.
I'm about to make bitmaps of the text just to make the client happy!

tralfaz

2006-04-04, 10:31 pm

"kmdesart" <webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote in message news:e0uvak$qs5$1@forums.macromedia.com...
> Thank you for your comments and for looking into my site! Just uploaded it last
> night...
>
> I will fix the size issue...lol. Thanks :)
>
> The font used is Lucida Sans Unicode. I thought that was a standard font. I
> really don't want to change it to like Arial or something, but do you think
> that would fix the problem?

You can use any font that you want to use if it's static text and also use any dynamic text that you need with embedded font
outlines.
Was the missing font only on particular browser or platform? It's ok in my PC, with IE6
tralfaz

Ralph

2006-04-05, 6:46 pm

dex002 skrev:
> Originally posted by: kmdesart
>
> So about the seperate swf files...Would I create a main swf file (ex:
> "portfolio") and several more swf files ("photos", "art", "logos", etc.) and
> load them as movie clips in the main swf file? Or would I just leave them
> seperate and have buttons that link them together? I sound confused because I
> am...
>
> Hey man, yeah Newsgroup User is right. Probably the best way for you to avoid
> the big main swf is to break it up into smaller ones. So you create a main swf
> that has the main navigation buttons on it but very little else, so it loads
> real fast. Then each nav button loads the corresponding external swf. Its
> important to do this so that users aren't downloading a bunch of stuff that
> they may not even be interested in. You can fairly easily add a preloader to
> each external swf too, so when a user clicks on a nav button, the preloader
> pops up instantly and show the user that the swf they're waiting for is on its
> way. There's a few ways to do this.
>
> Here's a really great tutorial by Lee Brimlow on doing this. Go to
> http://www.gotoandlearn.com and watch the video called "External SWF
> Preloading".
>
> Cheers, Matt
>

Yes, that's the best way to do it. So have I done and it
works very, very good.

Also when it comes to pictures and Photoshop, I always "save
to the web". There you can see the quality it will be showed
in the webpage and how ling it takes to download to the
browser. Wonderful function which makes the site very
friendly to the viewer.

Good luck,

Ralph

kmdesart

2006-04-05, 6:46 pm

Yes, it was only a few computers (last count, 3 friends - one laptop and two
PC's...), but I didn't check to see what browser they were using. I am
absolutely positive that I used static text. I only used dynamic text fields
for the status bar at the start. I didn't have a chance to fix anything last
night, so my other issues still remain, but this text thing just boggles my
mind!

kmdesart

2006-04-05, 6:46 pm

Question: A friend mentioned that perhaps I could outline the text in Adobe Illustrator and then import as graphic object. Possible? Or just a stupid fix to a stupid problem? lol...