Flunking Flex : Day 2

1. The bold font weight: Was still struggling with the font-weight issue on a button. The problem was that while the font was being applied to my TabBar after setting the Button font-weight to normal, on the active tab, there was still no text appearing since that was still bold. I finally found a solution but not before trying all kinds of random things – talk about taking the long route.

I set out solving the problem with the Button. Looked through available attributes that I can set through CSS – to no avail. Trying adding a font as an .swf – again to no avail. Then i googled away and found a solution which required editing the Font in a Font Editor and then setting the sub-family to bold. [http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/03/bitmap_fonts_in.html] That worked after much trial and error. Finally I decided it was time to post my Flex woes online for the day and realised I was approaching the problem from the wrong end.

I needed to set the font weight on the active tab.

Thus all I needed was adding this to my TabBar CSS declaration: selectedTabTextStyleName:"activeTab"; and then apply a normal weight to the activeTab.

2. What to use for styling?

There are too many ways to do things in Flex – all slightly inflexible. I’m unable to decide if I should use Degrafa, if I should use Illustrator or if I should use Photoshop to create my button skins. Guess, I better take an evolutionary approach to this one – so do the one that does the job right now – and worry about maintainability and size later.