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.