Lesson 14. Working with Text Fields

Although it's best known for animated and interactive content, Flash also provides a number of powerful capabilities for working with text. This is important because most of us learn and are informed by means of text-based content.

Flash allows you dynamically create text fields, set their various properties using ActionScript, and load and style the content within them. This gives you extensive control over the text content in your movie. In this lesson, we'll explore most of Flash's text capabilities.

One of the projects you'll create in this lesson is a Flash browser. This browser loads external HTML files into a text field and uses Cascading Style Sheets to format and style the text within the field.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, you will:

• Create text fields dynamically

• Format text using TextFormat objects

• Use the MenuBar component to add a menu to an application

• Use Cascading Style Sheets to easily format text within a text field

APPROXIMATE TIME

This lesson takes approximately two hours to complete.

LESSON FILES

Media Files:

Lesson14/Media/home.htm

Lesson14/Media/science.htm

Lesson14/Media/header_home.jpg

Lesson14/Media/header_science.jpg

Lesson14/Media/morning.swf

Lesson14/Media/galaxy.swf

Lesson14/Media/external.css

Starting Files:

Lesson14/Assets/flashWriter1.fla

Lesson14/Assets/flashBrowser1.fla

Completed Projects:

flashWriter3.fla

flashBrowser3.fla