Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional Bible

Chapter 8. Working with Text

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Finding resources to help you learn more about typography

• Understanding Flash text field types

• Creating text boxes and choosing text types

• Using the Property inspector to specify styles and alignment

• Applying live filters to create text effects

• Controlling font export and display

• Using font symbols and shared libraries

• Troubleshooting font management

• Reshaping and manipulating text characters

For designers who love fonts, Flash is a dream come true. Even if you never plan to animate anything, you may want to use Flash simply to see your fonts displayed how you want them, wherever and whenever you need them on the Web. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this unequivocal freedom, but Flash has options that give you text styles to meet nearly any project criteria.

Because Flash is a vector program, it enables you to integrate most fonts within the movie without any fuss. For standard text content, this means that fonts don't have to be rendered into bitmap elements—the .swf files that Flash publishes (or exports) will include all the necessary information for the font to display properly on every browser as long as the Flash Player is installed.

In this chapter, we introduce the various text types available in Flash and explain how and why they are used. This chapter also covers some basic font management issues and offers strategies for handling fonts in your project files (.fla) as well as in your published movies (.swf).

Flash includes some ...