I must say I had a good laugh looking at the Macromedia INTERNATIONALIZED application which was showcased on FlashForward and is now available on ericcd.net.

A little quote from the introduction page which elaborates over the advantages of using flash mx : "Not only does this reduce traffic on the server, it also provides the user with a more continuous experience."

That may be true for the english version of their demo application, but this thing is meant to showcase the INTERNATIONAL capabilities. So switch to Corean and... experience the exitement of a language that has more than 26 letters! You have to wait through a 2800+Kb download. And that's not for an full-featured intro with music, video and flying logos, no - just plain font. Sorry guys, but that cannot be the solution.

The reason I'm laughing is that I was fighting with exactly these matters during my struggles to use unicode in flash 5. The only reasonable solution regarding filesize I could come up with (and which I think is still the best) is to use swfx.org generator. This way you dynamically generate only the characters that you need.

The only alternative I could imagine for Flash MX is not to embed the fonts. And thinking further - that's probably one of the reasons why masking non-embeded fonts suddenly is fixed. But using that for headlines, I don't know...