Coding with Jesse

UTF-8 Encoded Dynamic Text in Flash MX

If you are struggling to get UTF-8 characters to show up properly in dynamic text fields in Flash movies, even though you've embedded the fonts, make sure you aren't publishing as Flash 5!

This painful undocumented little thing took me forever to figure out. I followed all the documentation to a tee, and had no success. Then, I tried to implement one of the examples I read. The example wouldn't work with my current publish settings (Flash 5) so I switched to Flash 6. All of a sudden, the characters displayed perfectly. It seems that UTF-8 support wasn't built into Flash 5, so when you publish for Flash 5 compatibility, it just won't work.

If, however, you are publishing with Flash 6 or higher, and you are still having trouble, you will definitely want to check out Unicode in Macromedia Flash MX on Macromedia's website. That page has links to all the relevant documentation, plus links to other Unicode related sites.

Published on December 1st, 2005. © Jesse Skinner

About the author

Jesse Skinner

Hi, I'm Jesse Skinner. I'm a web development coach & consultant. I teach web development teams how to scale up their server infrastructure, improve automated testing and monitoring, reduce costs, and modernize their legacy systems. I focus on empowering teams through customized training and coaching.

Feel free to email me. I'm eager to hear about your challenges and see how I can make your life easier.