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CHAPTER 10
Text
Macromedia Director MX creates text that is editable, anti-aliased, and compact for fast
downloading in any font on any platform. Combine these features with any of the animation
capabilities of Director, such as rotation, and you can create text effects that are not possible in
any other application.
You can embed fonts in a movie to ensure that text appears in a specific font when a movie is
delivered, regardless of which fonts are available on the user's computer.
Because Director renders text in the display font, and anti-aliases, or smooths, it as the movie
plays, text in Director is very compact and downloads quickly from the Internet. Most of the
high-quality text you see in web browsers is actually a GIF or JPEG graphic, and takes longer to
download than Director text.
Director provides many ways to add text to a movie. You can either create new text cast members
within Director or import text from an outside source such as a document stored on the Internet.
You can import plain text, RTF, or HTML documents. After text is part of your movie, you can
format the text in a variety of ways using the Director formatting tools. Director offers standard
professional formatting functions, including alignment, tabs, kerning, spacing, subscripts,
superscripts, color, and so on. You can also create hypertext links for any text.
Text in Director is editable when you are working on your movie and, optionally, while a
movie plays.
You can also use Lingo to control text. For example, you can use Lingo to edit the text in existing
cast members, specify text formatting such as font and size, and interpret strings that users enter.
To create the smallest possible text cast members, use field text. Field text is standard text
controlled by your system software, the same as the text you see in dialog boxes and menu bars.
Director does not anti-alias field text or support paragraph formatting and tabs for fields. As
with regular text, Lingo can control field text and specify whether field text is editable while
a movie plays.
Whereas regular text is best suited for large type that you want to look as good as possible, field
text is an excellent choice for large blocks of smaller text in standard fonts (such as Times or
Helvetica) that do not need to be anti-aliased.
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