Getting to Know Flash Pro - Text and Static Text Fields
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Text in Flash MX Professional 2004 provides added support for small font sizes. Essentially this means that you can view clearly small fonts in the 8-point range. It also supports a subset of CSS, enabling the designer to include CSS style definitions. The rest of dealing with text is very much like Flash MX. The Properties Inspector is where all the text sizing, font selection, style definition, and other Flash text formatting takes place.
In addition to the standard text fields, this latest version of Flash has a TextField component as well as some other components that deal with different types of text. However, Flash still has three main types of text fields: static, dynamic, and input.
New to Flash is the ability to include graphics in text fields. This new feature, discussed in Chapter 6, "Viewing and Entering Information with Text Fields," allows designers and developers to integrate graphics with a story in text. Chapter 6 also shows how text fields are used with the TextField and TextFormat classes.
Static Text Fields Static text fields are used primarily as text labels in the main Timeline or in movie clips. This type of text can be animated and changed dynamically, but only along certain dimensions. For example, a static text block can be motion tweened from one side of the Stage to the other, rotating as it goes. However, the static text block cannot have tweened colors.
Text blocks can be made into hot spots and linked to URLs. Static blocks of text can also be broken apart into graphics and reconstituted as virtually any kind of symbol and used exactly as a given symbol could be used in any style.
To see a simple example of how you might use a static text field, this next project adds to the earlier project in the chapter where a ball was tweened into a square. Open the FLA with the shape tween and use the following steps to add text:
Add a layer by clicking the Insert layer icon. Name the layer Text.
Click the Text layer and select the Text tool.
Click the Stage to the right of the circle and in the Properties Inspector set the type to 24-point Arial (or Helvetica on a Mac). Then click the Align Center icon near the right side of the Properties Inspector. Type in the message Amazing Magic Circle Transformed to Square, as shown in Figure 1.16.
Figure 1.16 Adding text to the Stage.
 This chapter is from Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004, by Bill Sanders (Sams, 2004, ISBN: 0672326051). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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