Flash Fox and Bono Bear (Chimps) (Chimps Series)

5.3. Adding Text to Your Drawing

Just as Flash offers tools for adding shapes and lines to your drawings, it offers a tool specifically designed to let you add text to your drawingsthe Text tool.

To use the Text tool:

1. In the Tools panel, select the Text tool (Figure 5-29, top ).

   Flash highlights the Text tool; when you mouse over to the Stage, your cursor changes to crosshairs accompanied by a miniature letter A.

2. Click the Stage where you want your text to begin .

   Flash displays a squished -up empty text box, and the Property Inspector displays text- related properties.

3. Drag the box a few inches .

   Flash widens the text box.

4. If you like, in the Property Inspector, change the font size , color , or any other text-related property :

   Text Type (Static, Dynamic, Input) . Static text is the text you add directly to your drawing, as shown in Figure 5-29; dynamic text is a placeholder for text that changes when your finished animation plays (for example, the current date or stock prices); input text is a text placeholder into which your audience can type text (and which you can then manipulate) when your finished animation runs. Find out more about static and dynamic text in Chapter 11.

   Figure 5-28. Top: Flash designates a "regular" layer using an icon of a little page turning.

   Bottom: Here you see a handful of circles being aligned on the diagonal. Although the diagonal line appears to be on the same Stage as the circles, it's not; it's safely tucked away in the guide layer. When you run your animation, all you see are your objects; the guide layer doesn't appear at all in your finished animation.

   You get the following options for Dynamic text only: Line Type (tells Flash to accept multiple lines of text or a single line); Selectable (tells Flash whether or not you want your audience to be able to select the dynamic text at runtime); "Render Text as HTML" (tells Flash to interpret any HTML code it encounters in the dynamic text instead of just displaying it); Show Border Around Text (tells Flash to display a border around the dynamic text to set it off from the rest of the content in that frame); and Var ( tells Flash what variable name you want to use for this dynamic text input field when you're accessing the contents of the field using ActionScript).

   Selection Width and Height . Type pixels to change the size of the text box.

   Selection X Position and Y Position . Type pixels to reposition the text box.

   Font . Click to select from a long list of text fonts.

   Letter Spacing . Drag the slider to squish letters together (or pull them apart), a process called manual kerning .

   Character Position . Choose from Normal, Superscript (raised slightly), or Subscript ( lowered slightly).

   Figure 5-29. Top: After you select the Text tool, click anywhere on the Stage and drag to create a text box. Then, inside the newly created text box, type the text you want to add to your drawing. (If you want to make the text box bigger, drag the white box you see in the lower-right corner.)

   Bottom: The Property Inspector lets you change any of the properties associated with the text: font size, style, color, and so on.

   Font Size . Drag the slider to choose a font size from 8 (super-small) to 96 (gigantic).

   Text Color . Click the color picker to choose a new color for the text.

   Bold, Italic, Align Left, Align Center, Align Right, Justify . Click these toggle buttons to apply bolding, italics, and alignment options to your text.

   Edit Format Options . Click to change indent, line spacing, and margins for your text.

   Change Orientation of Text . Flash assumes Horizontal, but you can click to choose Vertical, Left to Right or Vertical, Right to Left.

   Font Rendering Method . Click to choose from Use Device Fonts, Bitmap Text (No Anti-Alias), Anti-Alias for Animation, Anti-Alias for Readability, and Custom Anti-Alias. (Applying one of the first two options to fonts from 12 to 24 points can make the text appear a bit crisper.)

   Auto Kern . Turn on this checkbox to make your font look as natural as possible. ( Turn it off if you prefer to kern manually; see the Letter Spacing option above.)

   URL Link . Type a URL (such as www.missingmanuals.com) to display text in your finished animation as a clickable link.

   Target . Useful only if you're creating nested objects in Flash, this option lets you specify precisely where in the hierarchy you want to load the URL specified in URL Link.

5. In the text box, type the text you want to add to your drawing (Figure 5-29, top ).

   Flash displays your text based on the properties you set in the Property Inspector.

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   Tip: To change the properties of individual letters, simply select the letters you want to work with and then, in the Property Inspector, make the changes you want. If you want to apply other, nonProperties panel effects to individual letters, though (for example, if you want to skew or flip certain letters and not others, or apply a gradient ), you first need to break the text apart. To break text, select the text box; then choose Modify Break Apart twice . (Choosing Modify Break Apart once breaks text into individual text boxes; choosing the text a second time turns the text into a fill.)

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   Click a blank part of the Stage to exit text-editing mode .

   Flash removes the bounding box, and the text properties disappear from the Property Inspector. At this point you can move your text, resize it, and reshape it just as you can any other object. To change the text itself, though, you need to double-click the text box to get back into text-editing mode and redisplay the text properties.