Issue with fonts and FDT, AIR 3.5, and ASC 2.0

I recently updated my AIR SDK to version 3.5 with ASC 2.0. When I did this I ran into issues on a project that was compiling fine before. The issue was that a specific font (that was embedded using the Embed meta tag) could not be encoded and the project would not compile. I needed this font to be in the project so I couldn't just do away with it. After I spent an hour or so searching the web, I started trying whatever. I happened to try setting the Use ASC 2.0 MXMLC Compiler. This did the trick. So I don't know if this is expected behavior, but it was very frustrating. I figured I would post about it so anyone else running into the same problem might find this post.

Ant and FDT

I've been using Apache Ant to automate my projects for probably a few years now. I am not an Ant expert by any means. I know enough to automate my build:

• Compiling a swf for different environments (development, production, etc.)
• Copying files to web server
• Replacing tokens
• Running the app in the browser

It's rather basic stuff. And my editor of choice is FDT. Ant and FDT work nicely together and FDT even has some special Ant tasks which you can use from FDT. I prefer using these tasks as they perform very well. Better than the Flex mxmlc when it comes to compiling. Plus the FDT versions are much easier to work with. But clients usually want to be able to run the Ant builds themselves. And they don't always have FDT to build with. They may have to run Ant from the command line. So in the past I usually had two versions of certain tasks. One that uses the FDT specific Ant tasks and one which uses the mxmlc Ant tasks.

Setting up FDT 5.6 to use latest the version of Flash Player and use Stage3D

Few things are more frustrating than trying to learn new things by checking out examples and they don't work. I've run into that situation when trying to tinker around with Stage3D for the Flash Player web plugin .

Set for up Stage3D

It is necessary to jump through a few hoops before you can utilize the Stage3D features for the web plugin. They are the following: