Adobe Director 11 Tutorials
Text / Creating Text Cast Members
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Director 11 / Text / Creating Text Cast Members)
There are two ways to get text into your Director movies. You can create text within Director or import text from external files. In turn, Director provides two ways to generate text cast members directly on the Stage or in the Text Window. So let me review all of these methods for creating text cast members for your Director projects. Perhaps the easiest way to create text cast members is to do it directly on the Stage using the Tool Palette right here. The text cast member lets you drag out a text box and then type the text directly on the Stage. You can also format the text. I'll be talking about formatting text in the next movie. Notice you can always go back if you have mistakes and fix those mistakes by just clicking with the black Arrow tool on the mistake. You'll also notice that the text cast member, after you type it in, occupies the first available position right there in the Cast Window. If you need more formatting control, you can also create text cast members in the Text Window. To do that you'll want to choose insert, media element, text and that'll open up the text Cast Window here, where you can go ahead and type in add text to the Text Window. Notice that you have some formatting options that are available right here at the top of the window; bold, italic, underline, font sizes, font typeface there. This is the letting setting right here. Let's go ahead and add another line of text here. And you can see that I'm increasing the letting or the spacing between those two lines. Again, notice that the text that I'm entering here, when I'm done entering it, click on the plus button. It'll put in the next available cast position here in the Cast Window so I can add more text, change the formatting of that text including typeface and size and then when I'm done, click on the plus button. You can also use the previous cast member and next cast member buttons to scroll through the various cast members. Notice that I'm also scrolling through the cast member that I created by typing text directly on the Stage using the Text tool in the Tools Palette. So this will let me see all my text including text that I've imported from external files. If you have quite a bit of text, a more efficient way of getting text into Director is to import the text. Let me go ahead and close my Text Window. You can import text from any application that saves text in the rich text format. That's the RTF format or an application that saves in plain text. That's ASCII, A-S-C-I-I or from HTML documents. Use the standard importing procedure with the file, import and go ahead and browse to the location of your text file. Here is a rich text formatted document right there. So let's add that one and I also have a web page right here that I've saved as an HTML file. Actually, I saved this in Word as an HTML file, but you can basically import any existing HTML file and extract the text out of that as well. So let's add that file and then click on Import. Again, the text cast members appear in the next available position in the Cast Window. So there's the rich text format file. There's the website. Notice that the website text is formatted a little bit differently. But I can always go back and reformat this text. This basically just saves a lot of retyping if you already have your text in a website in HTML format or as an RTF text document. I should point out that according to the Director documentation, when you do import text from an HTML document, Director recognizes many of the standard tags and parameters, including tables. Also it approximates the formatting. Director doesn't recognize embedded objects other than tables and it doesn't support nested tables. It also doesn't recognize applet, form, frame, input or image tags. When you import text from an RTF file, Director recognizes most of the standard RTF formatting but it doesn't import pictures embedded in the file. Again, this is a technique for primarily just extracting all the text into Director as a text cast member. Ok, so you've either imported or you created from within Director here all of the text that you need in your project and it's all stored as cast members in your Cast Window. Next you'll probably want to edit and format this text. Director offers several ways to edit and format text, so let me move on to the next movie and review these various editing methods in more detail.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Director 11 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33901 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-84-4 |
| Release Date: | 2008-07-31 |
| Duration: | 9.5 hrs / 107 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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