Working with Droppers, Paint Buckets, and Ink Bottles

So far in this chapter, we've introduced the various ways of controlling your palette and setting stroke and fill colors on items selected with the Selection tool. There is one other set of tools used for applying colors and fills that will make modifying existing artwork even easier. You have already seen the Dropper tool in action when you select a color from any of the Swatches pop-ups — the Arrow pointer automatically converts to a dropper and allows you to pick up a color from any visible element to be loaded into the active fill or stroke color chip.

This same tool can be summoned at any time by clicking on the Eyedropper tool (I) icon in the Tools panel. You will notice that when the Eyedropper tool is used to pick up a fill color or bitmap, it immediately converts into the Paint Bucket tool (K) if you roll outside the area of the item you've sampled. The Paint Bucket enables you to dump the selected fill into any other shape just by clicking inside its fill area. If you have a fill or stroke selected when you invoke the Eyedropper tool, any other fill or stroke (color or style) that you pick up with the Dropper tool will be applied instantly to the selected item.

When you sample a stroke with the Eyedropper tool, it converts into an Ink Bottle tool (S), which you can use to apply the stroke to any other item. If the item already has a stroke, it will be modified, and if the item did not previously have a stroke, the Ink Bottle will add one.

Web Resource

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Summary

The science of color on the computer is far from accurate. There are many variables involved in the presentation of color over the Web.
Web-safe color does not ensure "good color" — many strategies go into applying color skillfully, but contrast can be the defining factor that makes or breaks your design.
Although Flash doesn't directly support color scheme plug-ins, colors can be loaded into the Color Swatches panel from source GIF files or custom Color Table (.act) files, or they can be sampled with the Dropper tool to load them into the active color chip.
The Swatches pop-up available from any of the color previews or color pointers in the Color Mixer gives immediate, intuitive access to the currently loaded swatches and all custom colors that have been added to the main Color Swatches panel. It also permits direct insertion of hexadecimal values.
The Color Mixer panel is used to create and modify gradients and select bitmaps to be used as fills, in addition to adjusting the alpha and tint of new or existing colors. Custom colors added to the current swatches will be available in any of the Swatches pop-ups.
Flash 8 supports 16-point gradients — allowing twice the number of control points within a gradient blend than previous versions of Flash.
The Eyedropper, Paint Bucket, and Ink Bottle tools work together to select and apply fill and stroke colors. We discuss the options for these tools, along with the Gradient Transform and Free Transform tools, in Chapter 9, "Modifying Graphics."
Advanced color capabilities of Flash include color tweening, scriptable color, and negative alpha. We discuss these topics in depth in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 8: Working with Text

Overview

In This Chapter

Finding resources to help you learn more about typography

Understanding Flash text field types

Creating text boxes and choosing text types

Using the Property inspector to specify styles and alignment

Applying live filters to create text effects

Controlling font export and display

Using font symbols and shared libraries

Troubleshooting font management

Reshaping and manipulating text characters

For designers who love fonts, Flash is a dream come true. Even if you never plan to animate anything, you may want to use Flash simply to see your fonts displayed how you want them, wherever and whenever you need them on the Web. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this unequivocal freedom, but Flash has options that give you text styles to meet nearly any project criteria.

New Feature

An improved anti-aliasing engine in Flash 8 solves one of the few problems that have troubled designers striving for text perfection in their Flash layouts. You will find a more detailed description of the various anti-alias options later in this chapter.

Because Flash is a vector program, it enables you to integrate most fonts within the movie without any fuss. For standard text content, this means that fonts don't have to be rendered into bitmap elements — the .swf files that Flash publishes (or exports) will include all the necessary information for the font to display properly on every browser as long as the Flash Player is installed.

In this chapter, we introduce the various text types available in Flash and explain how and why they are used. This chapter also covers some basic font management issues and offers strategies for handling fonts in your project files (.fla) as well as in your published movies (.swf).

New Feature

Flash 8 includes a Filters tab in the Property inspector for a new menu of live filters that you can apply to text without first converting the text into graphic shapes . This feature facilitates experimentation by making it easier for you to add or change an effect on the fly while preserving the editability of your text fields.

Flash includes some nifty Static text options for handling vertical and right-to-left -reading text. We will show you these options, along with the other character and paragraph controls and the new live filters available in the Property inspector. In this chapter, we will also touch on some features for optimizing text and working with international character sets in Flash.

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Reinhardt R., Dowd S.

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