You may want to take note that if you try to open a font file that isn't readable or doesn't exist, you will NOT get any kind of error back. You will in fact get an SWFFont object back that looks perfectly okay even though it isn't. Do something like this instead:
if (@is_readable($fontfile)) {
$font=new SWFFont($fontfile);
} else {
echo "ERROR: Font \"$fontfile\" couldn't be loaded!\n";
}
Hopefully this will get fixed eventually, but for now... that's all you can do.