About Transforming Text; Using Timeline Effects With Text; Breaking Text Apart - MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-USING FLASH Use Manual

About transforming text

You can transform text blocks in the same ways that you transform other objects. You can
scale, rotate, skew, and flip text blocks to create interesting effects. When you scale a text
block as an object, increases or decreases in point size are not reflected in the Property
inspector.
The text in a transformed text block can still be edited, although severe transformations may
make it difficult to read.
For more information about transforming text blocks, see Chapter 8, "Working with Graphic
Objects," on page 207.

Using Timeline effects with text

You can use Timeline effects to easily add animation to text. Timeline effects are prebuilt
animation effects that let you add motion to text with a minimum of effort. For example, you
can use Timeline effects to make text bounce, fade in or out, or explode. For more
information on using each effect, see "Using Timeline effects" on page 244.

Breaking text apart

You can break apart text to place each character in a separate text block. After you break text
apart, you can quickly distribute the text blocks to separate layers and animate each block
separately. For information on distributing objects to layers, see "Distributing objects to layers
for tweened animation" on page 252. For general information on animation, see Chapter 10,
"Creating Motion," on page 243.
You cannot break apart text in scrollable text fields.
You can also convert text to its component lines and fills to reshape, erase, and otherwise
manipulate it. As with any other shape, you can individually group these converted characters,
or change them to symbols and animate them. After you convert text to lines and fills, you
can no longer edit the text.
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