CS4 - Flash or Illustrator, distort tool?

[mgason]

Hi,
I have a Text mc I need to distort.
I can not figure out how.
Imagine a rectangle, if you use skew to lift the right side.
left and right are vertical and parallel still.
top and bottom are angled up but still parallel.

My problem is that I need the top and bottom to not be parallel.
I need to individually adjust the corners.

You can do this by holding cmd/ctrl while grabbing a corner with the transform tool, if just working with a shape.
Once it is a mc or text this does not work. Drag, it looks good but snaps back when you let go.
Can you do it in Illustrator?

In photoshop you can do it with the distort tool, but the text is rasterized.
I want to keep it as vector, even converted to outlines in Illustrator would do.

Thanks
mark

[flosculus]

cant you just merge the rectangle and the text in photoshop? then you ccan distort them both.

flash isnt really a tool for editing images

[mgason]

not sure what you mean by merge. I do not want the text to be rasterized because the mc scales during its movement.

I figured Illustrator would be the place to do it, but my Illustrator knowledge is pretty limited.

I did discover this trick in Illustrator, you draw a path over your text in the shape you want the text to conform to. Make sure the path is in front of the text.
Select both, go to Object/Envelope Distort/Make With Top object.
The text will take on take on the shape of the path.

Still seems a bit of a hard way, not always predictable.

I tried distort with a mesh, 1 cell, but when I grabbed the corners I got the handles that make curves, so it was hard to keep the distortion straight.

Mark

[milowerx]

I'm fairly certain you really can't do this in Flash without breaking the text first. In other words pressing CTRL B (CMD B for Mac). then the text will be distortable. It's pretty much impossible to warp text and keep it editable in Flash. You could do some warping in Illustrator but even then it's minimal without breaking the text into a shape.