How can I prevent text displacement for some foreign language fonts?

Posted by weltraumpirat on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by weltraumpirat
Published on 2011-01-03T10:31:51Z Indexed on 2011/01/03 10:53 UTC
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I have a multilingual project (currently 13 languages), which uses many different font variations of "Helvetica Neue", mostly bold, condensed and regular cuts from the LinoType Pro font set ( which includes western european characters) and the same for cyrillic. We will probably add chinese and japanese variations in the future.

I have set up the project to use different CSS stylesheets and separately load the fonts for each version, depending on which language the user selects, so I can have different line heights, kerning and/or font sizes to make everything keep the original look, even if the fonts look nothing alike.

All of this works well, except for one problem: For some reason, all cyrillic letters seem to be displaced. They appear 2-3 pixels below the correct base line, and actually protrude across the textfield's bottom border, even when the field is set to autosize. When I use textfield.getCharBoundaries(), all values seem to be correct, even though they obviously aren't rendered correctly.

To make everything look neat, I could of course manually move all problematic textfields up or down according to language and font size, but I was wondering if there was some way to prevent or at least detect this kind of displacement in order to automatically handle the adjustments - the Flash Player should have some sort of information on how things are rendered, shouldn't it? Have any of you had similar problems? Or better yet: a solution?

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