Working with Text > Text overview |  |

Text overview

You can include text in your Macromedia Flash MX movies in a variety of ways. You can create text blocks containing static text, text whose contents and appearance you determine when you author the movie. 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. Once you give 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 choose the following attributes for text: font, point size, style, color, tracking, kerning, baseline shift, alignment, margins, indents, and line spacing. See Setting text attributes.

You can transform text like an object—rotating, scaling, skewing, and flipping it—and still edit its characters. See About transforming text. When you're working with horizontal text, you can link text blocks to URLs. See Linking text to a URL (horizontal text only).

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 choose 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.

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 movies. See Creating font symbols.

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.

Flash movies can use Type 1 PostScript fonts, TrueType, and bitmap fonts (Macintosh only). You can spell-check text by copying text to the Clipboard using the Movie Explorer and pasting the text into an external text editor. See Using the Movie Explorer.

You can preserve rich text formatting in text fields, using HTML tags and attributes. See Preserving rich text formatting.

You can format static, input, and dynamic text using the Property inspector. You can also format input and dynamic text using ActionScript. ActionScript has events for dynamic and input text fields that you can capture and use to trigger scripts.

You can also use text fields to create scrolling text.

For an interactive introduction to creating text in Flash, choose Help > Lessons > Adding and Editing Text.