Whist creating my first animation - I was trying to place vertical label text on the sliders. The text was not appearing - there are numerous forumn posts on this subject. This was because I was not using embedded fonts  I managed to get embedded fonts working as follows

[Embed(systemFont='Arial', fontName='spArial', mimeType='application/x-font')]
public static var ArialFont:Class;


var textField: TextField = new TextField();
textField.text = "hello";
textField.selectable = false;
textField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
textField.setTextFormat(new TextFormat("spArial", 12, 0));
textField.embedFonts = true;
square.addChild(textField);

The problem with embedding fonts is that they increase the size of the swf by 100k which is a lot when the origional file was 8k. The following technique renders the text as a bitmap and this can then be rotated:


tmpTextField.selectable = false;
tmpTextField.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
tmpTextField.text = _label;
tmpTextField.background = false;


// http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=150918
var myBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(80, 20, true, 0x00000000);


myBitmapData.draw(tmpTextField);
_labelBitmapField = new Bitmap(myBitmapData);


_labelBitmapField.smoothing = true;
_labelBitmapField.rotation = -90;
_labelBitmapField.x = 0;
_labelBitmapField.y = _height;
addChild(_labelBitmapField);