How to Use Text and Fonts in Flash

Text is an important part of the websites. Flash provides you a lot of the control on the text you are using in flash documents. In this tutorial, you will learn the basics of the Text in Flash.  In the Adobe Flash CS3, there are three types of the text, static, dynamic and input text. 

Static text is used in the Title and the Label, dynamic text is used for displaying the text that changes dynamically at the runtime and the input text are used for the user activity like getting the user name and password in the Flash form. 

All these types of the text, there are multiple options like Font size, font style, colors, character width, height, maximum characters, character spacing, justification, drop shadow, blur, glow and drop shadow etc.  In fact, Flash allows you to produce multiple text effects that are not possible with the HTML and CSS.

Static Text

• Drag the Text box field on the stage and select the static text.
• After select the text you can change its color, font size, style, characters width, wrapping and the text type from the below properties box.
• In the text type properties box select the static text.
• You can adjust the size of the static text box by using the Rectangular handler in the upper right corner.
• Through the properties box you can also change the orientation of the text i.e. form horizontal to vertical and from vertical to horizontal.
• For hyper linking your text with a URL select the text and put URL address in the URL box below.

Input Text

• Drag the text box on the stage and select the type of the text as input text.
• Apart from the normal properties, the Input text option as other options such as multi line, single line, multi line no wrap and password etc.
• Input text is used for creating the Flash forms and to get the input from the users.
• In the Input text, you can also define the variable to store the user’s data.

Dynamic Text

The last text option in the Flash is the dynamic text.

• Drag a text box on the stage by using the text tool and select the dynamic text as a text type.
• Apart from the normal font properties there are some other properties in the dynamic text like single line, multi line, multi line no wrap and show border around text.
• You can also use the variable to dynamically assign the values at the run time or to get the input from the users.

Practicing all the three text options and their properties in Flash will make you to have a good grip on writing and manipulating the text in Flash.  The short cut key for the text tool is T.