Adobe font metrics

I am trying to write text (embedded fonts) around an arc. The effect is not very pleasing due to non uniform gaps around characters. Looking for a solution, i landed in site teknoel.com. The site claims that the text metrics in width, height properties of textfield give values of the bounding box and not the actual character. It also suggests using a parser to get these values from adobe font metrics file (afm). The site’s arc text looks very crisp.
Is this limitation of flash textfields still true?
Does anyone know of an actionscript class that parses this file?
thanks,
-logan