Using Text in Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8

You can apply new anti-aliasing settings that make normal and small-sized text much clearer and easier to read on screen than the anti-alias option that was available in Flash MX 2004. FlashType, the new text rendering engine in Flash 8, enhances the quality and consistency of the way Flash displays text. Text on the Stage now has a more consistent appearance when comparing text between the Flash authoring tool and in Flash Player.

Note: You can also apply advanced anti-aliasing using ActionScript code.

You can specify anti-aliasing options for individual text blocks; these options enhance the display of text for different environments (see Figure 12). For example, you can specify anti-aliasing for animation or readability, or apply custom settings that you control.

Figure 12. Text rendering in Flash 8 has improved considerably, especially with the embedded text pictured here.

Note: When you open a Flash MX 2004 file in Flash 8, your old text fields do not automatically get updated to use FlashType. You will have to adjust the text setting manually from Anti-alias for Animation to Anti-alias for Readability (which uses FlashType).

When you created text fields in Flash MX 2004, it was often awkward to resize them. Flash 8 has added text handles to the edge of text fields so you can resize a text field with increased level of control, while not skewing text (see Figure 13).

Figure 13. Text handles make it easier to resize text fields in Flash 8.

In Flash MX 2004, you might have felt limited by the amount of text you load into a text field because users could not smoothly scroll the text. If you loaded a lot of text into a field, the scroll bar might seem slow and clunky. In Flash 8 you can cache a movie clip that contains a scrolling text field to make the text scroll smoothly.

Numerous improvements have been made to text handling in ActionScript, including new properties and parameters in the TextField and TextFormat classes. For more information, refer to the TextField and TextFormat classes in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.