MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-FLASH, Use Manual

Page: 158 / 678

158 Working with Text
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 173 .
You can break text apart and reshape its characters. For additional text-handling capabilities,
you can manipulate text in FreeHand and import the FreeHand file into Flash, or export the
file from FreeHand as a SWF file. See
“Breaking text apart” on page 177 .
Flash documents can use Type 1 PostScript fonts, TrueType, and bitmap fonts (Macintosh
only). You can check spelling by copying text to the Clipboard using the Movie Explorer and
pasting the text into an external text editor. See
“Using the Movie Explorer” on page 46 .
You can preserve rich text formatting in text fields, using HTML tags and attributes. See
“Preserving rich text formatting” on page 178 .
When you use HTML text for the content of a dynamic or input text field, you can flow the
text around an image, including a SWF or JPG file or a movie clip. See “Using HTML-
formatted text” in
Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Flash .
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 ActionScript to control text, see Chapter 12,
“Working with Text and Strings,” in
Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Flash .
For an interactive introduction to creating text in Flash, select Help > How Do > Basic Flash >
Add Static, Input, and Dynamic Text.
This chapter contains the following sections:
About FlashType . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
About Unicode text encoding in Flash applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
About font outlines and device fonts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Creating text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Creating scrolling text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Setting text attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Creating font symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Editing text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Checking spelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
About transforming text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Using Timeline effects with text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Breaking text apart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Linking text to a URL (horizontal text only) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Preserving rich text formatting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178