FLASH Type - Part II

One thing you might have examined while surfing the web that we can copy & paste text from the web pages but whether in Flash sites or not lets take an experiment.

Type any word say "PAKISTAN" on the stage. Click Control > Test Movie to see its exported SWF movie. Can you select word "PAKISTAN" on screen? Surely no but how can we make it selectable text?

Close this SWF movie by pressing cross mark in the upper right corner of the screen. Double-click text if already not selected and click Selectable under Text Options panel. Now again test your movie by clicking Control > Test Movie.

Dynamic and Input Text

In the Text Options panel there are three text options namely Static Text, Dynamic Text and Input Text in the pull-down menu. The first one is already covered. Example of dynamic text is changing scoreboards as in games. We use input text when we want to get data from the user. Choose Input text from the pull down menu and click on the stage. Now you will see a small rectangle in the right bottom corner showing input text. Below it there are certain options like Line Type, Variable, HTML, Border/Bg, Embed fonts, Max. Chars, etc. Clearly a variable is required to store input data from user. Later we can use this variable to pass it from different functions. Input data may be a password so keeping it protected from others we choose Password in the Line Type. Border/Bg marks border around text block. Selecting HTML ensures that certain tags like <A>, <B>, <U>, etc. will apply. By defining Max. Chars, we restrict user to input text keeping in the range. Embed fonts define what range of characters you want to embed in the movie. Use left most button to embed entire font.

I have given you a brief opening to Dynamic and Input text. However their application will come in the project work.

Setting Type Block

Select Text tool and click on the stage. This will create one-line expanding type block. As you write the block goes on increasing in width. It never starts a new line. A small circle in the upper right corner of the block shows one-line expanding type block.

Again click on the stage and drag horizontally this time to define width of the type block and finally release the mouse button. Now the words will wrap in the defined width as you keep on writing. This time you will see a small rectangle instead of circle.

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