Flash Tools: Text Controls

Video Transcript

"So, let's just type out a word. And now we have all of these different controls available to us. The first thing that we see is, is it Static Text, Dynamic Text or Input Text. This is getting a little advanced but real quick, Static Text is simply that text that just, you know, is static, doesn't interact, just is readable. Dynamic Text is text that you load in from an external file or using variables or a number of different complicated action scripts that we probably won't get into on this series. And Input Text is, let's say I was creating a email form and I just wanted a plain text box that has no text in it, but that the user is going to type in their name and submit a form. So there we're going to input the text. So for our demonstrations we want to stick with Static Text. Then obviously we have the font. The nice thing is that if you select your text. You can just go straight through and take a look at all of the different fonts there available here. You'll notice that if that was not selected, in other words, if we just had this text box and we've just finished typing this, we wanted to change the font. Well it, it didn't change anything because the font has to be selected. So just, that's a gotcha to watch out for. Here we have the size of the font. Again, same thing, we just adjusted it but because the text wasn't selected we didn't, we didn't see any changes. Now if we select the entire box, now we can see the changes. Now there's a difference, it's subtle but it's important for your work flow to understand the difference. If we have our text box selected, but the cursor is still active it will not make any, any changes. Because Flash basically thinks we're going to continue typing and whatever we're about to type will be affected. But if we go to the selection tool then Flash knows we're not going to be typing anymore and any changes that we make it will apply across the board."