Displaying diacritics using Verdana/Arial fonts Windows XP

Question

When creating an application which needs to be capable of displaying a range of foreign characters we came across a display problem when attempting to display Swedish diacritics. The following sample application works fine using Windows Vista but doesn't display correcting using Windows XP:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical">
    <mx:Label text="Arial Unicode MS - Höglund" fontFamily="Arial Unicode MS" fontSize="16"/>
    <mx:Label text="Verdana - Höglund" fontFamily="Verdana" fontSize="16"/>
    <mx:Label text="Arial - Höglund" fontFamily="Arial" fontSize="16"/>
</mx:Application>

The screengrabs below show the labels rendered in Windows XP (first image on the left) and Windows Vista (on the right).

Using charmap suggests that both Arial and Verdana on Windows XP lack the necessary diacritic characters and hence don't display correctly whereas in Windows Vista the fonts are complete. The same in standard HTML appears to work correctly however (not sure if the browser is doing something in the background to insert known diacritic characters when it encounters fonts without).

Has anyone encountered a similar issue when displaying diacritics in Flash using Windows XP? I want to avoid embedding Arial/Verdana and unfortunately using Arial Unicode MS is not an option - Verdana must be used to fit with the clients style guidelines.

Answer 1

Never found a concrete answer to this but using Arial Unicode MS does display the diacritic characters correctly and so is the only answer I can find to this query. Note that this problem only occurs on Windows XP and is not affected by Flash Player version

global
{
   font-family: "Arial Unicode MS", "Verdana", "_sans";
}