Learning Flash CS4 Professional

Chapter 11. TEXT

Introduction

The lion’s share of the attention Flash receives is usually due to the eye candy that so many talented artists and programmers create every day. Over the last several years, however, Flash has become recognized more and more as a tool for creating applications in which text plays a major part.

Increasingly, Flash is used for everything from mortgage calculators to newsreaders to rich Internet applications of many kinds. Flash is even sometimes used as a front end for very text-intensive products, such as blogs, bulletin boards, and other dedicated content management systems.

As Flash matures, this trend increases. New versions of Flash and ActionScript continue to add text-related features, including improved components, application interface support for font families and styles, and even in-menu rendering that displays sample text in each font for an on-the-fly preview.

Note

At the time of this writing, Adobe was working on a new text architecture for the Flash Platform called the Text Layout Framework. Although still in beta, the framework boasts many dramatic text improvements, including reading and writing in vertical, right-to-left, and left-to-right languages; support for double-byte characters (used for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, among other languages); flowing text across multiple columns and linked containers, as well as improved flow around inline images; improved typographical control, such as kerning, ligatures, and hyphenation; enhanced ...