Chapter 6: Working With Text - MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004-USING FLASH Use Manual

CHAPTER 6
Working with Text
You can include text in your Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Macromedia Flash MX
Professional 2004 applications in a variety of ways. You can create text blocks containing static
text, text whose contents and appearance you determine when you author the document. You can
also create dynamic or input text fields. Dynamic text fields display dynamically updating text,
such as sports scores or stock quotes. Input text fields allow users to enter text for forms, surveys,
or other purposes.
Just 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, unlike with movie clips, you cannot write ActionScript code inside a text instance,
because text instances don't have Timelines.
You can orient text horizontally, with left-to-right flow, or vertically (static text only), with left-to-
right or right-to-left flow. You can select the following attributes for text: font, point size, style,
color, tracking, kerning, baseline shift, alignment, margins, indents, and line spacing. See "Setting
text attributes" on page 111.
The Check Spelling feature lets you to check spelling in text fields, as well as in scene and layer
names, frame labels, ActionScript strings, and other places where text occurs in your document.
See "Checking spelling" on page 117.
You can transform text as you would an object—rotating, scaling, skewing, and flipping it—and
still edit its characters. See "About transforming text" on page 119. When you're working with
horizontal text, you can link text blocks to URLs and make it selectable. See "Linking text to a
URL (horizontal text only)" on page 120.
Timeline effects let you apply prebuilt animation effects to text, such as bouncing, fading in or
out, and exploding. See "Using Timeline effects with text" on page 119.
When you work with Flash FLA files, Flash substitutes fonts in the FLA file with other fonts
installed on your system if the specified fonts are not on your system. You can select options to
control which fonts are used in substitution. Substitute fonts are used for display on your system
only. The font selection in the FLA file remains unchanged. See "Substituting missing fonts"
on page 122.
Flash also lets you create a symbol from a font so that you can export the font as part of a shared
library and use it in other Flash documents. See "Creating font symbols" on page 116.
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