Question

What does this mean?

“Minimize the Flash movie size by limiting the glyphs embedded in the movie” in sIFR3 to improve rendering speed

What is the meaning of “limiting the glyphs embedded in the movie”?

Answer 1

I am not familiar with sIFR, but since you’ve tagged it Flash, let me try and explain what it means in Flash world:

In Flash, if you want to make sure that the text in a TextField is displayed using the desired font irrespective of availability of the font at client’s machine, you can embed the appropriate font into the SWF at the compile time itself (this is not the sole purpose of embedding fonts though). You can either embed the font as a whole or opt to embed only the required characters (glyphs, to be precise) from the font if the text field is static. Obviously, embedding a full unicode font would make the SWF heavy (greater than 2MB I believe); thus if you’re sure that the text field is gonna use only a limited set of characters, you can tell the authoring tool to embed only those characters and save considerably on the SWF size.

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Here is a good link that explains the process (as it is done in Flash authoring tool):
Flash fonts tutorial

create a dynamic text field and from the properties panel select 'character'. Then choose the character ranges that you want to embed (hold down ctrl to select more than one) or manually type in the character ranges that you require.