Flex 2 Developer's Guide > Customizing the User Interface > Using Fonts > About the font managers

About the font managers

Flex includes two font managers by default. They take the embedded TrueType font definitions and draw each character in Flash Player. The two font managers are Batik and JRE, represented by the BatikFontManager and JREFontManager classes, respectively. The Batik font manager is limited because it cannot use local fonts; but, in general, it provides smoother rendering and more accurate line metrics (which effects multiline text and line-length calculations). Local fonts are fonts that are accessible through the operating system. The JRE font manager, on the other hand, can access local fonts used by the operating system, but the quality of output is generally not as good.

You determine which font manager you use in the flex-config.xml file. The default setting is to use both, as the following example shows:

<fonts>
    <managers>
        <manager-class>flash.fonts.JREFontManager</manager-class>
        <manager-class>flash.fonts.BatikFontManager</manager-class>
    </managers>
</fonts>

The preference of <manager> elements is in reverse order. This means that by default the Batik font manager is the preferred font manager. However, the Batik font manager does not support system fonts, therefore, the JRE font manager is also available to handle these cases.

Flex 2.01