MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-LEARNING ACTIONSCRIPT 2.0 IN FLASH Manual page 382

Device fonts
Device fonts are special fonts in Flash that are not embedded in a SWF file.
Instead, Flash Player uses whatever font on the local computer that most closely resembles the
device font. Because font outlines are not embedded, a SWF file size is smaller than using
embedded font outlines. However, because device fonts are not embedded, the text that you
create with these fonts looks different than expected on computer systems that do not have a
font installed that corresponds to the device font. Flash includes three device fonts: _sans
(similar to Helvetica and Arial), _serif (similar to Times Roman), and _typewriter (similar
to Courier).
Fonts
Sets of characters with a similar font face, style, and size.
String
A sequence of characters.
Text
A series of one or more strings that can be displayed in a text field, or within a user
interface component.
Text fields
A visual element on the Stage that lets you display text to a user. Similar to an
input text field or text area form control in HTML, Flash lets you set text fields as editable
(read-only), allow HTML formatting, enable multiline support, password masking, or apply a
CSS stylesheet to your HTML formatted text.
Text formatting You can apply formatting to a text field, or certain characters within a text
field. Some examples of text formatting options that can be applied to text are: alignment,
indenting, bold, color, font size, margin widths, italics, and letter spacing.
For more information on text, see the following topics:
About text fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .383
Using the TextField class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .384
About loading text and variables into text fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .392
Using fonts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .398
About font rendering and anti-alias text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
About text layout and formatting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414
Formatting text with Cascading Style Sheet styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
Creating a style sheet object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
Using HTML-formatted text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .436
Example: Creating scrolling text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449
382 Working with Text and Strings