Flash CS4 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Getting the Word Out with Text

In This Chapter

• Mastering the Text tool

• Stylizing text

• Creating text

• Editing text

• Finding and replacing items

Writers love words. So do readers. If you create Flash projects with information from writers that will be read by site visitors, it's your job to add the words to the Flash project. You do so with the Text tool. We know that sounds like a case of the blatantly obvious, but the Text tool isn't as easy to use as some would think. In fact, each of the three text types has different properties: garden-variety static text when you need to get the word out; dynamic text when you're creating a project with text that changes frequently or otherwise need to be addressed with ActionScript; and input text when you want site users to enter information such as their names or credit card numbers. (In fact, you can even animate text, but that's a subject for another chapter.) In this chapter, we show you how to master the Text tool.

Using the Text Tool

The Text tool is similar to one of those pens with three colors of ink and a PDA stylus all wrapped in one neat container. With the Flash text tool, you can create static text, dynamic text, or input text. In the following sections, we show you how to use the Text tool to create each text type.

Creating static text

Static text may sound somewhat boring, but you can get a charge out of it. You can use any font ...