Chapter 12: Working With Text; Text And Fonts In Flash - Adobe 38039336 - Flash CS3 Professional User Manual

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Chapter 12: Working with text

This chapter describes the various ways that text can be incorporated into your Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional
documents.

Text and fonts in Flash

About text
You can include text in your Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional applications in a variety of ways. You can create text
fields containing static text, which you create when you author the document. You can also create dynamic text fields,
which display updating text, such as stock quotes or news headlines, and input text fields, which allow users to enter
text for forms or surveys.
Flash provides many ways to work with text. For example, you can orient text horizontally or vertically; set attributes
such as font, size, style, color, and line spacing; check spelling; transform text by rotating, skewing, or flipping; link
text; make text selectable; animate text; control font substitution; and use a font as part of a shared library. Flash
documents can use Type 1 PostScript fonts, TrueType, and bitmap fonts (Macintosh only).
You can preserve rich text formatting in text fields, using HTML tags and attributes. When you use HTML text for
the content of a dynamic or input text field, the text can flow around an image, such as a SWF or JPEG file or a movie
clip. See Using HTML-formatted text in Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Adobe Flash.
Like movie clip instances, text field instances are ActionScript™ objects that have properties and methods. By giving
a text field an instance name, you can manipulate it with ActionScript. However, you cannot write ActionScript code
inside a text instance, because text instances don't have Timelines.
You can use ActionScript to format input and dynamic text, and to create scrolling text fields. ActionScript has events
for dynamic and input text fields that you can capture and use to trigger scripts. For information on using Action-
Script to control text, see Working with Text and Strings in Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Adobe Flash.
For a video tutorial about working with text, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0121.
For a sample file about working with text, see the Flash Samples page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_samples.
Download and decompress the Samples zip file and navigate to the Text\TextEnhancements folder to access the
sample.
For a video tutorial about using text with Illustrator and Flash, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0199.
See also
"About text fields" on page 265
Flash Text Anti-Aliasing
The Flash text rendering engine that provides clear, high-quality text rendering in Flash (FLA) documents and
published SWF files. The Anti-alias for Readability setting makes text more legible, particularly at small font sizes.
Custom anti-aliasing lets you specify the thickness and sharpness of fonts used in individual text fields.