Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: new Flash text abilities

Author:John Dowdell
Posted:1/22/2000; 10:38:06 AM
Topic:Flash in Manilla?
Msg #:14721 (In response to 14719)
Prev/Next:14720 / 14722

Yes, the audience can copy/paste even live data displayed in Flash 4 as antialiased text in designer fonts.

In Flash 4 you can set a text block to be a "text field". This can be selectable and editable by the site's audience. If you choose to include outline font glyphs then this will be antialiased on the fly. If you're familiar with the use of dynamic movie clips and the "load variables" command you can retrieve comma-delimited name=value pairs from text files on the same server for client-side dynamic integration of data feeds at runtime.

(Shockwave features the same abilities, and more, but the Flash 4 Player currently has a download rate of over a million per day and this smaller engine is available on more platform types.)

Yes, there's no "view source" or browser-based "find text in page". You can set a Flash file to duplicate its static text into the HTML source for search engines, if you wish.

An alternative approach is to have the server integrate on-demand data into a SWF file (or GIF, JPEG, or MOV) through Macromedia Generator. There's both serverside and clientside integration and generation now.

I regret that I don't yet have a full listing of who's doing what work now in various live-data integration into SWF files, but the macromedia.flash newsgroups are searchable via DejaNews, if that pointer is of use.

(Sidenote: It can be helpful to distinguish between the Macromedia Flash 4 authoring application, the various Flash Players, and the SWF file format itself. Various tools from other companies are now creating SWF files for display in the distributed Flash Players, and there are also third-party Flash Players that others have created for various platforms.)

Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Tech Support

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