To display text on the screen in Adobe® Flash® Player or Adobe® AIR™, use an instance of the TextField class
or use the Flash Text Engine classes. These classes allow you to
create, display, and format text. Alternatively, you can use the
Text Layout Framework (TLF) — a component library based on the Flash
Text Engine classes, but designed for ease of use. On mobile devices,
you can use the StageText class for text input.
You can establish specific content for text fields, or designate
the source for the text, and then set the appearance of that text.
You can also respond to user events as the user inputs text or clicks
a hypertext link.
Both the TextField class and the Flash Text Engine classes allow
you to display and manage text in Flash Player and AIR.You can use
the TextField class to create text objects for display and input.
The TextField class provides the basis for other text-based components,
such as TextArea and TextInput. You can use the TextFormat class
to set character and paragraph formatting for TextField objects
and you can apply Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) using the Textfield.styleSheet
property and the StyleSheet class. You can assign HTML-formatted
text, which can contain embedded media (movie clips, SWF files,
GIF files, PNG files, and JPEG files), directly to a text field.
The Flash Text Engine, available starting with Flash Player 10
and Adobe AIR 1.5, provides low-level support for sophisticated
control of text metrics, formatting, and bi-directional text. It
also offers improved text flow and enhanced language support. While
you can use the Flash Text Engine to create and manage text elements,
it is primarily designed as the foundation for creating text-handling components
and requires greater programming expertise.The Text Layout Framework,
which includes a text-handling component based on the Flash Text Engine,
provides an easier way to use the advanced features of the new text engine.
The Text Layout Framework is an extensible library built entirely
in ActionScript 3.0. You can use the existing TLF component, or
use the framework to build your own text component.
The StageText class, available starting in AIR 3, provides a
native text input field. Because this field is provided by the device
operating system, it provides the experience with which users of
a device are most familiar. A StageText instance is not a display
object. Instead of adding it to the display list, you assign an
instance a stage and a display area on that stage called a viewport.
The StageText instance displays in front of any display objects.
For more information on these topics, see:
Important concepts and terms
The following
reference list contains important terms involved with text handling:
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Cascading style sheets
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A standard syntax for specifying styles and formatting for
content that’s structured in XML (or HTML) format.
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Device font
-
A font that is installed on the user’s machine.
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Dynamic text field
-
A text field whose contents can be changed by ActionScript but
not by user input.
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Embedded font
-
A font that has its character outline data stored in the
application SWF file.
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HTML text
-
Text content entered into a text field using ActionScript
that includes HTML formatting tags along with actual text content.
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Input text field
-
A text field whose contents can be changed either by user
input or by ActionScript.
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Kerning
-
An adjustment of the spacing between pairs of characters
to make the spacing in words more proportional and the text easier
to read.
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Static text field
-
A text field created in the authoring tool, whose content
cannot change when the SWF file is running.
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Text line metrics
-
Measurements of the size of various parts of the text content in
a text field, such as the baseline of the text, the height of the
top of the characters, size of descenders (the part of some lowercase
letters that extends below the baseline), and so on.
-
Tracking
-
An adjustment of spacing between groups of letters or blocks
of text to increase or decrease the density and make the text more
readable.
