Subtitles of the Movie

We now come to the Text Tool. The majority of websites, even Flash websites, consist mostly of text, so text is still a very important media element, and learning Flash's Text Tool will be a very important skill for you. With Flash you have many options that go far beyond simply selecting the Text Tool and typing on the Stage. You can create horizontal or vertical text, change text attributes such as Kerning, which is the spacing between characters, and line spacing, or apply transformations such as Rotation and Skew. This is only the beginning of the Text topic and I devote a whole later section of the Tutorial on working with text in Flash. There you'll learn how to make text scroll, or create text fields where users can input their own information. Flash CS4 also includes a Spell Check feature and supports Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, which allow you to create Text Styles that can be applied to HTML, making the design across HTML and Flash content more consistent. Flash allows you to create three different types of Text Elements: Static Text; Dynamic Text; and Input Text. You'll learn about these different types of Text Elements in much, much more, later, but for now let me just start with the basics and give you an overview of Flash's text capabilities, mostly by using the Text Tool here in the Tools Panel. To start, click on the Text Tool and then drag out a Marquee by holding down the mouse key and dragging onto the Stage and then simply type into the Marquee, the Text Marquee there that is created when you use the Text Tool, then drag on the Stage. You can then choose what kind of text you want to create up here in the Properties Inspector Ð there's a drop-down at the very top. Static Text is the default. Dynamic Text allows you to modify the text using Action Scripting. Input Text allows users to actually input into that text field. Each of them looks a little bit different. For example when you deselect the text, Input Text looks like this, it has that dotted line around it. Dynamic Text looks like this, with that dotted line around it; actually I don't notice much difference between the dotted line around the Dynamic Text versus that for Input Text. There's the Input Text. But the default Static Text, there is no border around the text. You can also modify the text by double-clicking on the text using the Text Tool. Actually if you double-click on the text using the Black Arrow Tool, the Text Tool will automatically be selected there in the Properties Inspector. You can then highlight the text to change the position and size, X and Y, Width and Height, here in the Properties Inspector, like so. Also, the family, the font family that you want to use, such as any of the fonts that you have installed on your system. Now, with Flash, the typefaces that you use will be included in the published SWF file, so you can freely use additional typefaces. With Dreamweaver-based pages you're restricted to the fonts that the user has on their system. Usually that's a variety of Arial, Helvetica, or Times, Times New Roman, or Garamond, the basic typefaces. But here with Flash you're only restricted with your font family to the fonts you have installed on your system, so you can really get some crazy typefaces and they will be exported or published when you publish the file. Now if you move the FLA file to another computer, the computer will ask you what to do with this typeface if you don't have it on the other computer. So, if you are using unusual font families you'll want to make sure that you have all the fonts on each of the authoring computers that you're using. You can also set a Style, Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Black. Notice that there's also a nice little preview of what this will look like. And there are quite a number of styles, Post or Compressed, Condensed, Condensed Italic, so Flash has really improved in the way that it handles your text. You've also got Color setting here, Auto Kern; again, the kerning is the spacing between the letters. You can let Flash do that automatically. And then, what I really like, is the Anti-Aliasing settings. Let's change that back to Black so we can see that, and let's take off the Condensed Italic, and just do Black, like so. The Anti-Aliasing settings are numerous. You can use Device Fonts, which will rely on the fonts on the device. That's a great way of saving space if you're using quite a bit of text in your projects and you want to really save space in your published file. Device Fonts will not export your font family but will use one of them. Usually there are three typefaces that are installed on all computers. You can use Bit-Map Text, No Anti-Aliasing. If we zoom in I can demonstrate for you what Anti-Aliasing is. Notice that those edges of the letters are very sharp versus Anti-Alias for animation makes that very smooth. Now, animation will take a lot of resources on your CPU, so in addition to resources for animation, the anti-aliasing takes resources, so if you're going to be animating the text you'll want to set this Anti-Alias for Animation, which is a little lighter on the CPU. This is Anti-Aliasing for Readability. If you've got some small text, for example, that you want to make it very, very legible, it's important that you change the Anti-Alias for readability. And then you've also got a Custom Anti-Alias Setting, where you can set the thickness and the sharpness, so I definitely recommend that you practice and experiment with this setting. Now, I've got mine zoomed in so you can really see what I mean by Anti-Aliaising. There it is there. But you'll want to probably zoom back out by double-clicking on the Magnifying Glass, or the Zoom Tool and then adjusting the Anti-Alias, looking at it at 100 percent.