Today at work we rediscovered the Flash / Flex font size limit of 127px.

We are creating an RIA that needs the ability to scale down a large SVG to a web editor and then scale it back out for a print-ready SVG. Flex would take a 300 px font, convert it to a 127 px font, and then scale it down. This caused our textfields to be very small and inconsistent.

When attempting to load external compiled css swfs that have an embedded font into my flex application I was getting this error: Unable to load style(SWF is not a loadable module). This is reported as an official bug on adobe’s site at: Enable Local App to load RunTime CSS.swf from Server

To solve this, you require two things.

1. Crossdomain Policy


2. Local Apache Web Server

Regardless if this is a bug, the host server still needs a crossdomain policy at the root of the domain. Here’s an example crossdomain.xml policy.

The next problem is that you cannot load external compiled swfs from a
document root (c:/my documents/flex projects/myProject/myProject.html) until the bug is fixed.

PC Users:
What I did is installed easyphp. Next, I set up an alias in easyphp. Right click on the ‘easyphp’ icon in the taskbar -> administration. I set the alias to my bin folder of my project so that when I access the url http://127.0.0.1/myProject/myProject.html it loads up my bin directory. Also in my debug settings in flex I set the default debug and run path to launch as http://127.0.0.1/myProject/myProject.html.

Now my css/style swfs are loading great remotely. The only downside is having to run easyphp on top of everything just to load in my external compiled font swfs.

Mac Users:
Thanks to Bryce Barrand

• go to system preferences


• click on sharing


• click on “web sharing” (this will turn on the automatically installed version of apache)


• edit apache’s httpd.conf file (should be found at disk/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf)


• Find the line that says /Directory>
  
• Just after that, add an Alias for each project that you want to test such as this:

  Alias /nameOfAlias /pathToYourFlexBinFolder

• Set your directory node attribute to ”/pathToYourFlexBinFolder”. Set the directory node value to:
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
  
• Restart the webserver by unchecking and rechecking the “web sharing” checkbox

should be good to go after this. you can see the results by going to http://localhost/nameOfAlias in your browser