Building Flash® Web Sites For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Getting the Word Out

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Creating text

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Formatting text

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Converting text to graphic objects

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Creating interactive text

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Using the text area component

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Flash is all about motion and animation, but sometimes you’ve got to get the word out with text. A picture is worth a thousand words, which means you need at least a thousand words to describe a picture. And if you have to describe 10 or 15 pictures . . . yikes, that’s a whole lotta text! In this chapter, I show you how to use the Text tool to add text to your Flash Web designs. I also show you how to format text so you’ve got, you know, Flashy text. And those clever Flash designers have also given you a way to receive and dispense information. These devices are known as input text and dynamic text. And if you have more text than you can fit in your Flash Web site, I show you how to deal with that, too. And you make them all with the handy-dandy Text tool, otherwise know as Text-O-Matic.

Using the Text Tool

Flash designers tried to cleverly disguise the Text tool, making it look like a child’s building block with a capital A inside it. But I bet that didn’t fool you one bit. Even though the Text tool may look simple, it is capable of doing many things. With it, you can create text that can be viewed on any machine, create a text box to fill an area, create text boxes to ...