You can include multilanguage text in your document in the following ways:

• The Strings panel lets localizers edit strings in a central location in Flash or in external XML files with their preferred software or translation memory. Flash supports multiline strings in both the Strings panel and the XML files.

• Select which character sets to embed in your applications, which limits the number of character glyphs in your published SWF file and reduces its size.

• Use a Western-style keyboard to create text on the Stage in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

• If you have Unicode fonts installed on your system, enter text directly into a text field. Because the fonts are not embedded, your users must also have Unicode fonts.

  Other, less common methods of including multilingual text in your Flash documents include the following:

• Include an external text file in a dynamic or input text field by using the #include action.

• Load external text or XML files into a Flash application at runtime by using the loadVariables or getURL actions, or the LoadVars or XML objects.

• Enter Unicode escape characters in the string value for a dynamic or input text field variable.

• Create an embedded font as a symbol in your Library.

  For Unicode-encoded text to appear correctly, users must have access to fonts containing the glyphs (characters) used in that text.

For a sample of multilingual content, see the Flash Samples page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_samples. Download and decompress the Samples zip file and navigate to the Text\MultilingualContent folder to access the sample.

When you use external files that are Unicode encoded, your users must have access to fonts containing all the glyphs used in your text files. By default, Flash stores the names of fonts used in dynamic or input text files. During SWF file playback, Flash Player 7 (and earlier versions) looks for those fonts on the operating system running the player.

If the text in a SWF file contains glyphs that the specified font does not support, both Flash Player 7 and Flash Player 8 attempt to locate a font on the user’s system that supports those glyphs. The player cannot always locate an appropriate font. This behavior depends on the fonts available on the user’s system, as well as on the operating system running Flash Player.

When you select ranges of fonts to embed in a FLA file, Flash uses the UnicodeTable.xml file to determine which characters to embed. The UnicodeTable.xml file contains ranges of characters required for various languages and resides in the user configuration folder of your computer. The is located in the following directories:

• Windows: <boot drive>\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash<version>\<language>\Configuration\FontEmbedding\

• Macintosh: <user>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash <version>/<language>/Configuration/FontEmbedding/

The font set groupings are based on the Unicode Blocks as defined by the Unicode Consortium. To provide a simpler workflow, when you select a particular language, all related glyph ranges are embedded even if they are scattered into disjointed groupings.

For example, if you select Korean, the following Unicode character ranges are embedded:

3131‑318E Hangul symbols

3200‑321C Hangul specials

3260‑327B Hangul specials

327F‑327F Korean symbol

AC00‑D7A3 Hangul symbols

If you select Korean + CJK, a larger font set is embedded:

3131‑318E Hangul symbols

3200‑321C Hangul specials

3260‑327B Hangul specials

327F‑327F Korean symbol

4E00‑9FA5 CJK symbols

AC00‑D7A3 Hangul symbols

F900‑FA2D CJK symbols

The following table gives more details about the font selections for embedded fonts:

If you load external text or XML files that are not Unicode-encoded into a Flash Player 7 application, the text in the external files does not appear correctly when Flash Player attempts to show them as Unicode. To tell Flash Player to use the traditional code page of the operating system that is running the player, add the following code as the first line of code in the first frame of the Flash application that is loading the data:

system.useCodepage = true;

Set the system.useCodepage property only once in a document; do not use it multiple times in a document to make the player interpret some external files as Unicode and some as other encoding, because this can yield unexpected results.

If you set the system.useCodepage property to true, the traditional code page of the operating system running the player must include the glyphs used in your external text file for the text to appear. For example, if you load an external text file that contains Chinese characters, those characters do not appear on a system that uses the CP1252 code page, because that code page does not include Chinese characters. To ensure that users on all platforms can view external text files used in your Flash applications, encode all external text files as Unicode and leave the system.useCodepage property set to false by default. This causes Flash Player to interpret the text as Unicode. For more information, see useCodepage (System.useCodepage property) in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.

All text in a computer is encoded as a series of bytes. Many different forms of encoding (and therefore, different bytes) represent text. Different kinds of operating systems use different kinds of encoding for text. For example, Western Windows operating systems usually use CP1252 encoding; Western Macintosh operating systems usually use MacRoman encoding; Japanese Windows and Macintosh systems usually use Unicode encoding.

Unicode can encode most languages and characters used throughout the world. The other forms of text encoding that computers use are subsets of the Unicode format, tailored to specific regions of the world. Some of these forms are compatible in some areas and incompatible in other areas, so using the correct encoding is critical.

Unicode has several forms. Flash Player versions 6 and 7 and later support text or external files in the 8‑bit Unicode format UTF‑8, and in the 16‑bit Unicode formats UTF‑16 BE (Big Endian) and UTF‑16 LE (Little Endian).

Flash Player 6 and later versions support Unicode text encoding. Users with Flash Player 6 or later can view multilanguage text, regardless of the language that the operating system running the player uses, if they have the correct fonts installed.

Flash Player assumes that all external text files associated with a Flash Player application are Unicode encoded, unless you tell the player otherwise.

For Flash applications in Flash Player 5 or earlier that are authored in Flash MX or earlier, Flash Player 6 and earlier versions display the text by using the traditional code page of the operating system running the player.

For background information on Unicode, see Unicode.org.