Enumeration FontType

Using device fonts results in a smaller movie size, because font data is not included in the file. Device fonts are often a good choice for displaying text at small point sizes, because anti-aliased text can be blurry at small sizes. Device fonts are also a good choice for large blocks of text, such as scrolling text.

Text fields that use device fonts may not be displayed the same across different systems and platforms, because they are rendered with fonts installed on the system. For the same reason, device fonts are not anti-aliased and may appear jagged at large point sizes.

Text fields that use embedded fonts are always displayed in the chosen font, whether or not that font is installed on the playback system. Also, text fields that use embedded fonts are always anti-aliased(smoothed). You can select the amount of anti-aliasing you want by using the TextField.antiAliasType property.

One drawback to embedded fonts is that they increase the size of the SWF file.

Fonts of type EMBEDDED can only be used by TextField. If flash.text.engine classes are directed to use such a font they will fall back to device fonts.