Creating Multilanguage Text > Text encoding in the Flash MX authoring tool |  |

Text encoding in the Flash MX authoring tool

The Flash MX authoring tool encodes text in FLA documents using the traditional code page of the operating system running the authoring tool. For example:

| On Western Windows operating systems (English, French, German, and so on), the encoding is CP1252.
| On Western Macintosh operating systems, the encoding is MacRoman.
| On Japanese Windows or Macintosh operating systems, the encoding is Shift-JIS.

When you publish or export a FLA document as a Flash Player 6 movie, the compiler assumes all text in the document is encoded using the traditional code page of the operating system running the authoring tool. The compiler converts text in the document into Unicode, and the Flash Player 6 interprets the text as Unicode.

You can create text in Flash MX in any characters supported by the code page of your operating system. However, you cannot create text in Flash MX that uses characters not supported by the code page of your operating system. For example, if you are using Flash MX in U.S. English for Windows, you can create text in most Western languages, but you cannot create text in Korean, because the CP1252 code page does not contain Korean characters.

You can't paste Unicode-encoded text into Flash MX. The compiler cannot recognize Unicode-encoded text when you publish or export the document; it can only recognize text in the document that is encoded in the traditional code page of the operating system running your Flash MX application.

You can create a Flash Player 6 movie that contains text in multiple languages (that is, text using glyphs that aren't in the traditional code page of the operating system running the authoring tool) in several ways:

| Include an external text file using the `#include` action. See Creating movies with multilanguage text using #include.
| Load an external text or XML file using the `loadVariables` action, the `getURL` action, the `LoadVars` object, or the `XML` object. See Creating movies with multilanguage text by loading external text or XML files.
| Add Unicode characters to a text variable, using the four-digit hexadecimal code points for the Unicode characters. See Creating movies with multilanguage text using text variables.