Summary

• Flash offers robust and well-organized text editing controls, but you can make the most of these tools only if you are familiar with, at least, the basic principles of typography.

• Studying the history of type in visual communications is one of the most practical and inspiring things you can do to improve your design skills.

• The option for converting any font into an aliased outline that can be embedded with the final movie (.swf) introduced with Flash MX 2004 is still available in Flash 8 — this overrides the default smoothing or anti-aliasing that can make some text look slightly blurry.

• Complete font information must be available on your system in order for Flash to render and export the text properly to the final movie (.swf). If you need to open a Flash file (.fla) that includes fonts not available on your system, you can choose temporary substitute fonts without damaging the original font information stored in the file.

• Creating Font symbols and storing them in Shared libraries for either author-time updates or runtime linkage can help you to manage large projects by centralizing font sources and making updates faster and easier.

• You can add visual interest to your text with Timeline Effects and Filters while still keeping options open for editing the content of the text field.

• The new Filters in Flash 8 are an easy and amazingly versatile method of adding style to all types of text fields. Because Filters are rendered dynamically, they can be applied to Dynamic text even if the content changes at run time.