Embedded font anti-aliasing problem (partial italics)

I’m working in flash mx 2004, and publishing in flash 6 (a requirement)

I need to have a dynamic text box that’s partially italicized and anti-aliased. I created my text box manually and put the text in like this:

america_txt.embedFonts = true;
america_txt.html = true;
america_txt.htmlText = “<i>America</i> (1972)”;

I’m using an embedded font symbol from an external fontlibrary swf. I actually decided to embed the font because I needed the text to become anti-aliased, and it wasn’t anti-aliased until I embedded the font (arial). I hate to embed such a common font, but I couldn’t get the text to anti-alias in flash 6 until I did.

My problem is, I have to make part of the text italic, and when I use the htmlText setting, it doesn’t work unless I comment out the embedFonts line, then it works, but the text is aliased and looks bad for the design I’m implementing (bold AND italic).

If I leave the embedded font in, and check italic on the font symbol (should just include the italic font outlines) ALL my text becomes italic. This seems like a bug in the font symbol, it should just make italic outlines available, not make all the text italic!

It looks like the customize anti-aliasing isn’t available in flash 6. Is there another way I can create partially italicized anti-aliased text in a dynamic text field (I’m changing the color of the text depending on input)? Do I NEED to embed arial to have it anti-alias?
Thanks,
Wendy