Flash 8 Cookbook

Chapter 7. Working with Text Basics

Text is one of the ways in which you can communicate with users in a Flash movie. You can use text to label buttons and movie clips, or you can use text to display detailed information to the user. You can display text that you have hardcoded into your Flash movie at authoring time or dynamic text that you generate at runtime. Equally important is that text is one of the means by which users can communicate with your Flash movie. Input text fields allow users to enter values such as their username, a quantity of a product, or information for a feedback form.

Flash text is simple, because you can accomplish a lot with text in very intuitive ways. At the same time, Flash text is complex, because Flash offers many options to manipulate and format text. Although this chapter focuses on solutions that don’t require scripting, we’ll see how ActionScript can offer powerful control over text. But don’t panic—the ActionScript in this chapter is minimal and easy to understand.

There are a few basic things you should know about Flash text while reading the recipes in this chapter. Flash supports three kinds of text: static, dynamic, and input. Use static text to display text that does not need to update at runtime. If the text is likely to update at runtime, use dynamic text, which you can modify at runtime. And lastly, input text allows users to enter text values into your movie. Input text is a subset of dynamic text, in that you can modify them in the same ...