About text

You can include text in your Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional applications in a variety of ways. You can create text fields containing static text, which you create when you author the document. You can also create dynamic text fields, which display updating text, such as stock quotes or news headlines, and input text fields, which allow users to enter text for forms or surveys.

Flash provides many ways to work with text. For example, you can orient text horizontally or vertically; set attributes such as font, size, style, color, and line spacing; check spelling; transform text by rotating, skewing, or flipping; link text; make text selectable; animate text; control font substitution; and use a font as part of a shared library. Flash documents can use Type 1 PostScript fonts, TrueType, and bitmap fonts (Macintosh only).

You can preserve rich text formatting in text fields, using HTML tags and attributes. When you use HTML text for the content of a dynamic or input text field, the text can flow around an image, such as a SWF or JPEG file or a movie clip. See Using HTML-formatted text in Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Adobe Flash.

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, you cannot write ActionScript code inside a text instance, because text instances don’t have Timelines.

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 Working with Text and Strings in Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Adobe Flash.

For a video tutorial about working with text, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0121.

For a sample file about working with text, see the Flash Samples page at www.adobe.com/go/learn_fl_samples. Download and decompress the Samples zip file and navigate to the Text\TextEnhancements folder to access the sample.

For a video tutorial about using text with Illustrator and Flash, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0199.