I recently learned a technique that I appreciate a lot. A small and very easy solution, which documentation is very well hidden. My initial problem: Fading a textfield (using its Alpha values) without needing to embed the font. Having a Flash solution that should work with many languages, and in my case with Russian characters. Until I had to take the Russian characters in mind I embedded the fonts and everything was fading nicely. But when I chose the Russian language no text appeared at all…

After googling the web for a while, looking for workarounds I finally found a great solution. Setting the BlendMode on the textfield to BlendMode.LAYER will do the magic!

myTextField.blendMode = BlendMode.LAYER;

The image slideshow displayed on http://www.visitnorway.com now uses this solution and should be working good on all languages.