MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-USING FLASH - Page 188

188 Working with Text
6. In the Object field, enter the name of the TextFormat object you created in step 3,
myformat. The following code appears in the Script pane:
mytext.setTextFormat(myformat);
For more information, see “Using the TextFormat class” in Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Flash.
Using text field events to trigger scripts
You can use ActionScript to capture events that happen to text fields—for example, you can
determine whether a user has changed or scrolled the text. You can write ActionScript
statements that use these events to trigger scripts to run.
You can capture the following text field events:
onChanged and onScroller.
To use a text field event to trigger a script:
1. Assign an instance name to the text field. Do one of the following:
■ Use the Text tool to create a text field on the Stage. Assign the text field an instance
name in the Property inspector.
■ Use ActionScript to create a text field dynamically with the createTextField
method. Assign the text field an instance name as a parameter of the
createTextField method.
2. In the Actions panel, select the Built-in Classes category in the Actions toolbox, then select
the Movie category, then select the TextField category, and then select the Events category.
Finally, double-click an event. For this example, use the
onChanged method.
3. Replace the placeholder instanceName with the actual instance name of the text field.
4.
Add ActionScript statements inside the function. These statements run when the text field
is changed.
About using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) with text
fields
You can attach style sheets to text fields to control text formatting. Flash supports a subset of
CSS tags. You attach a style sheet to a text file using the TextField.StyleSheet object. See
“Creating a style sheet object” in Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Flash.