MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-LEARNING ACTIONSCRIPT 2.0 IN FLASH, Manual

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12
CHAPTER 12
Working with Text and
Strings
Many of the applications, presentations, and graphics that you create with Macromedia Flash
Professional 8 or Macromedia Flash Basic 8 include some kind of text. You can use many
different kinds of text. You might use static text in your layouts, but dynamic text for longer
passages of text. Or you might use input text to capture user input, and text in an image for
your background design. You can create text fields with the Flash authoring tool, or use
ActionScript.
One way to display text is to use code to manipulate how strings appear before they are loaded
and displayed on the Stage at runtime. You can work with strings in an application in several
ways, such as sending them to a server and retrieving a response, parsing strings in an array, or
validating strings that the user types into a text field.
This chapter describes several ways to use text and strings in your applications, focusing on
using code to manipulate text.
The following list describes terminology used in this chapter.
Alias Aliased text does not use color variations to make its jagged edges appear smoother,
unlike anti-aliased text (see following definition).
Anti-alias
You use anti-aliasing to smooth text so the edges of characters that appear
onscreen look less jagged. The Anti-Alias option in Flash makes text more legible by aligning
text outlines along pixel boundaries, and is particularly effective for clearly rendering smaller
font sizes.
Characters
Characters are letters, numerals, and punctuation that you combine to make
up strings.