Adobe Director 11 Tutorials
Text / Editing & Formatting Text
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Director 11 / Text / Editing & Formatting Text)
Once you have all of your text cast members prepared and organized in the cast window by either importing text files from external sources or entering text into the text boxes by typing or perhaps copying and pasting is another way to do it; copy and pasting from a text editor into a text cast member here in Director. Probably ready to edit and format the text. Director offers several ways to accomplish this. You can edit text directly on the Stage and format it with the Text Inspector. Notice if I double click on my text Sprite here, I have a Sprite tab that allows me to set color, inks and so on. I also have a Text tab here that gives me some additional options for formatting my text. If you want to work in a more traditional text editing environment, you can also edit the text in the Text Window, select the text Sprite and then choose from the main menu, window, text and that'll bring up this Text Window editor in which you can work more like in a traditional word processor. You'll notice that many of the settings in either the Text Window or the Property Inspector here or the text Inspector are the same. For basic text editing, it's probably fastest to edit text directly on the Stage using the Text Inspector. After you create the text cast members for your movie, you can set the font, style, size, line spacing and color. Let me go through the Font dialog box, but many of the same options are available in the Text Inspector over here. First to use the Font dialog box, double click a text Sprite or cast member here on the Stage. Select it. Then choose Modify, font. This opens up the Font dialog box where you can set your font, style, create superscripts, subscripts, strikeouts, set the size, spacing here, as well as kerning. Kerning is the spacing between letters. Notice that there's a nice preview down on the bottom that shows you your settings including your typeface, your size, the spacing as well as your kerning. Notice that the spacing is the spacing between lines of text. I also refer to as letting. Let me now talk a little bit about formatting paragraphs. You can specify the alignment, indentation, tabs and spacing for each paragraph in a text cast member. I'm going to review the procedure for formatting text in the Text Window, but many of the same formatting options are available in the Text Inspector and also the paragraph dialog box. The paragraph dialog box can be found by choosing, first selecting the text Sprite and then choosing Modify, paragraph right there. You need to actually double click on the Sprite, then choose modify paragraph. That'll open up the paragraph dialog where you can set the alignment, margins, spacing, indentations and so on. I think it might be a little bit easier, however, to use the Text Window. So you'll want to double click the text Sprite in the Score or on the Stage. You can also double click the text cast member in the Cast Window. This'll open up the Text Window or you can choose window, text with that Sprite selected. If the ruler up here is not visible, choose from the main menu view, rulers. That'll toggle the rulers on and off. So notice that you have some formatting options here, including margins, indent, select the paragraph you want to modify and notice that there's my indent. You can also set up essentially page widths here with these icons. This is very similar to Word, Microsoft Word if you've ever used Word to set the paragraph widths and indent. You can also set tab stops by clicking here or by pressing the tab button on your keyboard like so. I'm pressing the Tab key. These work very similar to a word processor if you're familiar with word processors. You can set line spacing and also change the setting within the line spacing control. Let me go ahead and add some lines here. To see that, select the paragraph and then the line spacing tool is here. If you change this line spacing setting, Director stops making automatic adjustments. To resume automatic adjustments of spacing, enter zero here in the line spacing tool like so and then Director brings that back to default. You can also set paragraph alignment here. To set alignments, click on one of the alignment buttons, align center, right justify, full justify or left justify. To change the kerning of selected characters, change the value in the kerning option. And that's a little bit hidden right over here. Let's open up my window. This is increasing the space between the selected letters. Now Director can also quickly apply formatting changes to entire cast members. This process is quite a bit faster than manually opening each cast member and applying changes. Any change that you apply to a cast member effects all the text within the cast member. To do this in the Cast Window or on the Stage, select all of the cast members you want to change. Let's do this in my Cast Window. And let's say I have these six cast members. Let's SHIFT+CLICK the first and last in that sequence, select all of them and then you'll use the Text Inspector by choosing Modify, font and let's go ahead and change all those fonts to symbol, for example. Click OK and notice that all of the text cast members now have the symbol font. So there you have a quick review of several methods and tools here in Director for modifying and formatting cast members or Sprites, including setting line spacing control, tab stops, formatting fonts and styles and color, as well as kerning and paragraph alignments. Now, before actually creating text cast members, it's good practice to embed the fonts you want to use in your movie. So let me now move on to the next movie here and give you an introduction to how to embed fonts in your Director movies.
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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