Replacing Fonts


One issue that does come up repeatedly in Flash development is how to find and change all occurrences of a particular font inside of a Flash movie. In Flash 3 or 4, you had to hunt through your movie frame-by-frame, movie clip-by-movie clip. In Flash 5, you can take advantage of the Movie Explorer's Find feature and just type the name of the font you are looking for in the Find text box. You can change all instances of one font at the same time. You can't change multiple fonts at a time.

Exercise 3.4 Using the Movie Explorer to Replace Fonts

In this exercise, you change all instances of the device _sans font to Arial (or Helvetica).

  1. Open MovieExplorer.fla from the Chapter_3/Assets folder.

  2. In the Find text box, type _sans to see all the symbol definitions where text with a font type of _sans is located. (See Figure 3.10.)

    Figure 3.10. Use the Find text box to filter the Display list based on a font type.

    graphics/03fig10.gif

  3. Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) on the text symbol beneath the logotext1 movie clip on the Display list. Choose Panels from the Options pop-up menu to open the Character and Info panels.

  4. To locate this text on the Stage, either double-click the text symbol or open the Options menu and choose Goto Location. Either choice opens the movie clip with the text you want to change in symbol editing mode. Double-clicking on the text symbol also makes it editable from within the Movie Explorer.

  5. Select a new font type (Arial or Helvetica) from the Character panel.

    Two things should happen. First, you should notice that the font type of the text on the Stage changed. Second, the movie clip containing the font you just changed is no longer available in the Display list. That's because you are filtering on _sans.

  6. Repeat Steps 5 and 6 for any other occurrence of the _sans font that you want to change.

    You don't need to save any of the changes you made to this movie. This was just for practice. You actually build this movie in Chapter 8.

Although it would be nice to be able to globally change fonts in a Flash movie, that capability just isn't there yet. However, being able to find all occurrences of a font so that you can change each one is a powerful tool that was unavailable before the introduction of the Movie Explorer.



Inside Flash
Inside Flash MX (2nd Edition) (Inside (New Riders))
ISBN: 0735712549
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 257
Authors: Jody Keating

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