Working with Fonts

Fonts are the trickier part of the Visual Applet Configurator. The fonts you use in our applets must be of a special format with the fft-extension (Macromedia Generator Font format). However, you can always use the system fonts: Times New Roman, Arial (or Verdana) and Courier. These are "built-in" into the applets. The applets would be somewhat boring if you could only use these fonts, so we are providing you with a multitude of freeware fonts that have been available to us from their creators.

Selecting a font in the VAC Configuration Dialog

The font fields are usually located under the Fonts-tab in the VAC configuration dialog. It will look like this when you click on the "..." button:

The font selection dialog

This field will contain the three system fonts (_arial, _courier and _timesroman) in addition to the FFT fonts you have in your folder.

The difference between system fonts and FFT fonts

So, what's the difference between using the system fonts and the FFT fonts? The system fonts (_arial, _courier and _timesroman) will take up less space on your created SWF file. FFT fonts however, will be embedded into the SWF file. This means that by using these fonts, your file can swell significantly.

How to put your own fonts into your folder

Use the font conversion option in the program menu under "Tools". You can read more about this here.

Using Fonts in JavaScript Effects

JavaScript effects work a bit different, the font specification varies from effect to effect. Note that you also can set the fonts on the effects by just editing the JS file, and they are largely dependent on where you put the <SCRIPT> tags.