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Month: August 2011

SOLVED! Google web fonts not displaying on (some) macs

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On August 24, 2011

In HTML/CSS

Google web fonts are great. If you don’t know about them, you really need to check them out. They enable you to embed non-standard fonts into your website …and you don’t have to worry about any font licensing issues. But, we recently ran into a problem at work with Google web fonts – they weren’t displaying correctly on some Macs and Apple products. The really frustrating thing is that they worked fine on most Macs, but on some machines they didn’t work at all, no matter which browser we used. The fonts worked correctly on the Google web fonts site, but not when we used the Google code samples on our own sites.

One of my coworkers dug into the issue and found an undocumented solution. Simply add the !important hack to the font-face declarations in your CSS wherever you specify a Google font. Problem solved! Here’s a quick example:

<head>
    ...some meta tags and junk here...
    <link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Rokkitt" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"></link>
    <style="text/css">
        ...some styles...
        h1 {
            font-family: 'Rokkitt', serif !important;
        }
        ...some more styles...
    </style>
    ...more junk here maybe...
</head>

We never did figure out what is causing the issue, or why it only occurs on some Macs. Ultimately, though, we don’t care why it happens, as long as we can fix it. Anyway, since this bug is undocumented as far as I can tell, I thought I’d share this simple hack that fixes it. Thanks to my coworkers at Toolbox No.9 for solving the problem!

Flash mystery error 1046: InstanceInfo

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On August 8, 2011

In Actionscript/AS3, debugging, Flash

I was working on a Flash component today and it started throwing this exact error at me after I cut-and-pasted some of the designer’s assets into the FLA:

1046:Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: InstanceInfo

I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t have any symbols, actionscript, or instance names of “InstanceInfo.” I wasted nearly an hour tracking down this issue only to find out that it was another damn TLF Textfield BUG! Does anyone actually use the TLF Textfield? It’s nothing but trouble for me.

Enough ranting. The problem was that the designer had accidentally created a few TLF Textfields in a separate FLA, which I pasted into my FLA. Unfortunately, my document was set to publish to Flash 9, which doesn’t support TLF Textfields. The really annoying thing was that I didn’t get a warning from Flash when I pasted in the assets and the IDE gave me a cryptic and useless compiler error.

Luckily, the fix is simple. Open up the publish settings and click on the Flash tab. The IDE will then finally flag the TLF Textfields as a problem and show you a warning popup. If you want to change your publish settings to Flash 10, click “cancel” when the popup appears. If you want to keep your settings where they are, click “ok” and flash will convert your TLF Textfields to Classic Text. Save your FLA and you’re done!

I’ve been to busy to post much here lately, but I thought that this might actually save someone else a small headache.

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