Understanding Dynamic Text Fields

Dynamic and input text fields are quite different from the static text fields you have worked with earlier. These different kinds of text fields can each handle changing text. This means you can load text into them and change the text based on some kind of event that happens while the SWF file is running.

Dynamic and input text fields can also understand HTML formatted text. This means you can use HTML tags within the text you enter or load into the field, and Flash will display the font type according to the tags within the text. For example, you could enter <b> tags to boldface text, and Flash will render text within the dynamic text field as bold. You can also place URLs, images, and paragraphs within a dynamic text field using HTML tags. You will explore these techniques in Lesson 9, except you will use a TextArea component, which works in almost the same way.