Most people don’t think in code points – which seems like a pretty good state of the world to me.

The only downside is that dealing with fonts for Flash applications and sooner or later the whole web is far more complicated than it would otherwise be. Let me explain.

Each time your client requests you use their corporate typface or your designer decides that he absolutely, positively can’t use a web-safe font for some other reason, you have to somehow get font glyphs to the user that he doesn’t already have installed on his machine. In html, this is mostly done using png’s, increasing the download time and the complexity of changing the content. But at least for Flash you can instead embed the glyphs and keep your content as text. How do you do that? You embed the font in your swf and let the Flash player use it to render the content.

Now what you don’t want to do is embed the whole font, because that’ll add between several dozen kb and several mb (no kidding!) to your swf. Instead, you’ll want to embed only the glyphs you need to display your content. And this is where Unicode code points come into the picture: You need to use those to tell the compiler which glyphs to embed.

To make a long story short, you’ll have to find out which Unicode ranges to use to make the compiler embed the glyphs you need. And for that, I’ve written a small JavaScript tool, which allows you to enter ranges of characters or just a bunch of text, which it then converts into an optimally reduced set of Unicode ranges.

You can find this tool here, I hope you find it useful and not too ugly.