Drawing Tools

Text Tool

Gives great opportunities to the Flash designer. As Flash movies are used mostly for the Internet it overcomes one of the major drawbacks of the traditional HTML design.

Text rendered by HTML use fonts, which are installed on client’s computer and there is no guarantee that font you suggested would be displayed as you expect. If HTML designers want to display artistic fonts they need to use bitmaps instead. In contrary, fonts in Flash are vectorized and are kept inside the Flash files exactly as designed.

Now draw your first words “Hello Flash” on the stage.

Depress Text button on the Tool panel and type the text on the Stage. From many options, which are displayed on the Properties Inspector, you will need now Font (marked with capital A), Color, Size at most. Experiment also with other options (character spacing, character position, subscript-superscript, alignment). You will see that those properties are close to what you have seen in text and graphical editors.

The only thing you need to let “as is” – keep the text type as “Static text” – another options allows to change the text programmatically or input text manually and we won’t use them for now.

When you are familiar with text typing on the Stage unselect ready text. If now you click it once Flash considers text as a “block” and you may move it altogether. If you apply properties like font size or colors they will affect all the text.

However if you double-click the text you may proceed with “internal editing”. You may type another words or, for example select with the mouse one of the letters and change it’s size and colors.

Work with text and keep in mind attractive artistic fonts for the future use.

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