Flash MX Hands On Training: Working with Text

This chapter will show you how to create horizontal or vertical text, text fields that bring in text from an external document, make text scroll, and create text fields where someone can enter information themselves.

This sample is taken from Chapter 12: "Working with Text" of the glasshaus title "Flash MX H.O.T"

3. Working with Dynamic Text and HTML

In the last exercise you created a Dynamic Text field in your project file that displayed the data of an external text file. In this exercise, you will take it one step further and change one setting of the Dynamic Text field to allow Macromedia Flash MX to recognize and preserve HTML formatting applied to the content inside the external text field.

1. Open the textFileLearning.txt file from the chap_12 folder. This is the same .txt file you worked with in the last exercise.

Note | Dynamic Text HTML Support

Macromedia Flash MX supports the following HTML tags in Dynamic and Input Text fields:

<A> = anchor, = bold, = font color, = typeface, = font size, = italic, = paragraph, = underline, and <a href=&> = hyperlinks.

Macromedia Flash MX supports the following HTML attributes in Dynamic and Input Text fields:

LEFTMARGIN, RIGHTMARGIN, ALIGN, INDENT, and LEADING.

You will add some of these tags in the next few steps.

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2. Add Bold HTML tags around the words Renting the Board. It should read Renting the Board.

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3. Add Font Color HTML tags around the words lift ticket, rental and lessons. It should read  lift ticket, rental and lessons.

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4. Add Italic HTML tags around the word reduced. It should read reduced.

5. Save and close this file.

6. If it isnt still open from the last exercise, open the dynamicText.fla file from the chap_12 folder.

All you need to do is change one setting and you will see the HTML-based text file loaded into the same Dynamic Text box.

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7. Select the Dynamic Text field on the Stage, and in the Property Inspector check the Render text as HTML button. This will allow the Dynamic Text block to interpret the HTML code and dynamically display any of the supported HTML tags within the external text file.

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8. Test your movie! You will notice that Macromedia Flash MX recognized all the HTML formatting you made in the text file!

9. Save this file and keep it open for one more exercise.

George Petrov

George Petrov is a renowned software writer and developer whose extensive skills brought numerous extensions, articles and knowledge to the DMXzone- the online community for professional Adobe Dreamweaver users. The most popular for its over high-quality Dreamweaver extensions and templates.

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Comments

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November 6, 2002 by Jack xiang

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great!!

November 19, 2002 by Behring Bautista

Perfect to start working with text.

It was so helpful to me.

But I get and error in the username/password example. If somebody can give a hand i will very greatful.

It seems everthing is ok, but it doesn't verify the password , whatever I write I go always to frame 10 (pass) and never reach the frame 20 (fail). :-) thank you

nice tutorial...but...

March 8, 2004 by Stefaan Contreras

How to avoid a 'space' as the first character on a new line? Let me explain a bit more: since the wrapping is done by Flash it happens that a space and the rest of the text is wrapped to the next line. How can this be avoided?

Multiline Text

April 13, 2004 by Kevin Slack

Indeed, this is very useful information. I apologize if this is not the correct forum for asking questions. But I have the same problem as Stefaan. How do you keep a mulitline text box from starting a new line with a space character? It's very annoying besides ugly. Thanks.

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