Please - embedded fonts with dynamic textboxes (and masks!)

[flashMine]

Hey,

I've been teaching myself Flash for a few weeks (Flash 5). This site has been a fantastic help - with the example .fla files - thanks a lot to all of you!

I need help with text in my Flash movie, found at SMRTJ
The source file is here


I have the content of each page in a movieclip which fades in (as a motion tween) and fades out (by actionscript). The "content" movieclips contain the textboxes which have variables "text1" to "text5" i.e. they are dynamic textboxes with the strings being loaded into those variables from an external .txt file. I have chosen to allow HTML tags so that the admin guy can make bold and italic characters when editing the external text files.

If I embed the entire font (garamond) while allowing HTML, parts of the text disappears! I.e. any numbers in bold and italicised text. I can recover the italicised text by setting the property of the textbox itself to "italic."

I can live with the present situation, but it strikes me as very odd. I'd love anyone to explain this to me.

Further - I'm also trying to mask dynamic text. I'm sure I'll have lots of fun embedding that! I want to use the text itself as the mask and have a white box behind it with an alpha gradient; this way, the text will fade onto the screen as it is scrolled. You can see what I mean on the "Style" page of my site, although this only static text yet. I'd appreciate any pointers on this too.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Chris
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"Some people bring hapiness wherever they go; others, whenever." Oscar Wilde (I think?)

[catbert303]

Hi,

With the disappearing text the problem is that when you include font outlines flash works out which outlines it should include based whether the textfield contains text displayed in bold or italic using the B and I buttons.

So if the movie doesn't contain a textfield (with font outlines included) that has some bold text in it, no bold font outlines will be included in the file - hence when it comes to displaying the bold html text, the font outlines aren't available so the text doesn't display.

The easiest fix for this is to create a textfield off the edge of the stage, in this textfield type in some text. Then using the B and I buttons make some of the text bold, some italic and some bold and italic. If you include the font outlines for this hidden textfield all the required outlines will be available in the movie and the html text should display correctly.

I think you can use dynamic text as a mask using the setMask movie clip method. Place your textfield inside one movie clip and the thing you want masked in another, then you can use,

clipContainingTheThingToMask.setMask(clipContainin gTheDynamicText)

[flashMine]

Hey,

Thanks a lot, I think I understand what's happening now.

I'll try what you suggested and get back if(when) I have any problems.

thanks again,
Chris