Trying to optimize a banner ad., baffling, a single textfield, no embedded fonts, just switching to a different font has HUGE differences in the swf size. Interestingly that actually embedding the glyphs don't seem to take up as much space as I would have though. Here's a size report with a bunchof textfields on stage:
Font Name Bytes Characters
---------------------- --------- --------------
DejaVu Sans Light 28510
Linux Libertine 26852
Warnock Pro SmBd 26184
Warnock Pro 25379
Chaparral Pro 20827
Myriad Pro 17713 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz <--very little diff.
Myriad Pro 15541
Adobe Caslon Pro 11549
Kozuka Mincho Pro EL 3809
Franklin Gothic Medium 2697
_sans 2447
Arial 2447
_serif 2335
Tahoma 1819
Verdana 1445
Abadi MT 1183
Baskerville 1158
Abadi MT Light 1082
Trebuchet MS 335
Times 319
Microsoft Sans Serif 38
Arno Pro 30
Courier New 31
Letter Gothic Std 22
Courier New 19
Sveningsson 19
Wingdings 18
Arno Pro 18
AbcPrint 18
Georgia 17
Futura 17
The goal here is to have a lightweight placeholder font, so that the runtime fonts can be loaded up once. At the moment just mentioning Myriad Pro ends up taking as much space as the font library we created earlier (!). My present guess is that the size of the library is related to the number of characters inside it, some of the doubling may be the jump from small ascii tables, to big unicode tables.
As much as I love Myriad Pro, alternates with similar spacing and weight for MyriadPro (16K), are Georgia (18bytes), Arno Pro(30B), Trebuchet (335B), Abadi MT (1K)...more than doubling in size at every step!
UPDATE:
Something very wierd is going on. In playing around with it, I was able to get one text field that had only 22Bytes and used Myriad Pro. However other fields that looked identical in the properties panel, when turned on ended up being 17Kb. I'm wondering if somehow turning on/off embedding causes this switch.
