Actionscript Cookbook

Typographical Conventions

To indicate the various syntactic components of ActionScript, this book uses the following conventions:

Menu options

Menu options are shown using the → character, such as File → Open.

Constant width

Indicates code samples, clip instance names, frame labels, property names, and variable names. Variable names often end with the standard suffixes that activate code-hinting (such as _mc for variables that refer to movie clip instances). Although using these suffixes is considered the best practice, for brevity or clarity, the preferred suffixes have sometimes been omitted.

Italic

Indicates function names, method names, class names, layer names, symbol linkage identifiers, URLs, filenames, and file suffixes such as .swf. In addition to being italicized, method and function names are also followed by parentheses, such as duplicateMovieClip( ).

Constant width bold

Indicates text that you must enter verbatim when following a step-by-step procedure, although it is sometimes used within code examples for emphasis, such as to highlight an important line of code in a larger example.

Constant width italic

Indicates code that you must replace with an appropriate value (e.g., your name here). Constant width italic is also used to emphasize variable, property, method, and function names referenced in comments within code examples.

When referring to properties and methods of objects and classes, I use these conventions:

• Class-level (static) properties are shown with the both ...