138 Chapter 8: Working with Text
To format a text field with the TextFormat class:
1 In a new Flash document, create a text field on the Stage using the Text tool. Type some text
in the text field on the Stage, like “Bold, italic, 24 point text”.
2 In the Property inspector, type myText_txt in the Instance Name text box, select Dynamic
from the Text Type pop-up menu, and select Multiline from the Line Type pop-up menu.
3 In the Timeline, select the first frame in Layer 1 and open the Actions panel (Window >
Development Panels > Actions).
4 Enter the following code in the Actions panel to create a TextFormat object, and set its bold
and italic properties to true, and its size property to 24.
// Create a TextFormat object
var txtfmt_fmt = new TextFormat();
// Specify paragraph and character formatting
txtfmt_fmt.bold = "true";
txtfmt_fmt.italic = "true";
txtfmt_fmt.size = "24"
5 Apply the TextFormat object to the text field you created in step 1 using
TextField.setTextFormat().
myText_txt.setTextFormat(txtfmt_fmt);
This version of setTextFormat() applies the specified formatting to the entire text field.
There are two other versions of this method that let you apply formatting to individual
characters or groups of characters. For example, the following code applies bold, italic, 24-
point formatting to the first four characters you entered in the text field.
myText_txt.setTextFormat(txtfmt_fmt, 0, 3);
For more information, see TextField.setTextFormat() on page 702.
6 Select Control > Test Movie to test the movie.
Default properties of new text fields
Text fields created at runtime with
createTextField() receive a default TextFormat object with
the following properties:
font = "Times New Roman"
size = 12
textColor = 0x000000
bold = false
italic = false
underline = false
url = ""
target = ""
align = "left"
leftMargin = 0
rightMargin = 0
indent = 0
leading = 0
bullet = false
tabStops = [] (empty array)
For a complete list of TextFormat methods and their descriptions, see the TextFormat class entry
in Chapter 12, “ActionScript Dictionary,” on page 205.
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