Font embedding in Haxe/ OpenFL

Many hours and a few days later, I’ve just about tackled another Haxe bugbear – font embedding. Basically, it didn’t work in html5 at all with the old backend for reasons I never did figure out, but does work in the new, bleeding edge html5 backend released just 9 days ago.. so that’s what I’m having to use. Real canary-in-the-coal-mine territory here.

Only small snag is that the approach used to embed fonts in html5 crashes the flash build. Luckily, you can work around that thanks to the tags that Haxe has for compiling or ignoring code based on target platform.

So, without further waffling, here’s some code that works, for everything. I spent ages figuring this out with basically no documentation and a frustrating AddingText sample that didn’t want to work when I threw my own font file at it. So, if you’re having similar problems, here’s a no-nonsense guide on how to work around it and get on with making your app or game.

 

Put this  in your Main class, after your imports:

#if js
@:font("Assets/fonts/nameofyourcrazyfont.ttf") class DefaultFont extends Font {}
#end

And then, this in your Main constructor:

#if js
Font.registerFont(DefaultFont);
#end

 

That will embed the font properly on html5 targets (not required at all for all other targets and causes problems with them, hence the #if js wrapper).

And, for the second part, here’s the code for creating a TextFormat, which of course, you can then apply to a TextField:

 

public static var name_of_your_crazy_font:Font = Assets.getFont("assets/fonts/nameofyourcrazyfont.ttf");

#if js
var body_text_format = new TextFormat ("nameofyourcrazyfont");
#else
var body_text_format = new TextFormat (name_of_your_crazy_font.fontName);
#end

And that’s it sorted! Font embedded on all platforms, including the new pixi.js-based one which is currently in an serious state of beta, but hopefully will be worked on a lot and fixed up over the next month or two. Note that this code might not work on the old backend with your font. It didn’t with mine, which is why I had to figure all this out in the first place.

 

I’m hoping this will be the last cross-platform problem I have to deal with for a while.. after a week with Haxe I’d like to get on with making the game rather than wrestling with the platform!