I know this may sound basic, but have you tried actually generating the movie, not just watching the preview window? I find that the preview window can be often incorrect where the actual movie is just fine.

Yeah, I have, but good call. The text, even with anti-aliasing disabled, looks badly anti-aliased in the preview but fine in the movie except that the top pixel is missing in both. Weird.

Maybe the Baseline Shift attribute or something?
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/8/main/00000513.html

I tried adjusting the baseline shift to no avail. I wonder if it only happens on this computer? I'll send myself a copy and look at it at home. If anyone else has encountered this, please let me know how you solved it.

I just tried out, and it's quite simple to fix this problem.
As odd as it might sound, you'll need to select "Anti-alias for animation" as the Font rendering method, instead of "Bitmap text (no anti-alias)".

That doesn't make any sense. But it works. Go figure. Thanks!

edit: I wonder if it is a bug in the font or in Flash 8?

> I wonder if it is a bug in the font or in Flash 8?

Neither, I'd say. Unlike previous versions, Flash 8 offers additional Font Rendering methods. The way these new options were worded was probably unfortunate, as they're not quite intuitive. I guess that's the problem.

I have the same problem, since I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I experienced that it really is a Tiger-specific problem with all later versions of Flash (since Flash MX 2004)
Under Panther there were no problems at all and under Leopard it works also good.

Maybe, and say maybe, the issue is in the font, it has to do with the vertical metrics, as stated in this post here
Font dimensions · at Typophile