Posts tagged with “flash ide”, “tips”, and “source”

June 03, 09

Assassinating jumpy htmlText hyperlinks

UPDATE: Read this great tutorial on styling the HTML text field

I read quite recently that people are still swearing Flash jumpy hyperlinks in htmlText with Anti-aliased for readability option turned on. What are they talking about? – here's the example.

Roll over and out the links in the left column and carefully observe what happens to the text. Pretty bad stuff.

Fortunately, there is a perfect workaround discovered by Jonnie Hallman aka Destroy Today, but not everybody knows about it yet. So, (to save the world), I wrote a simple TextField wrapper class that automatically deals with the issue, additionally it also fixes another annoying bug – selectable code>TextField scrolls one line on text select – when you click and drag down the mouse while selecting the text, the content scrolls vertically! (and it shouldn't as the text height is the same as the box height, so there's nothing to scroll)

The fixed TextField is presented in the right column – again, try rollover the links.

How does the fix work then?
Basically, after setting the htmlText property, store the height of the TextField, then set autoSize to NONE. That will lock it, so no no more jumping is happening. It is all done at one go by overriding htmlText setter method.

override public function set htmlText(value:String):void
{
    autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
    super.htmlText = value;
    recordedHeight = height;
    autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.NONE;
    // adding extra height will prevent "vertical scroll on text select" bug
    // the extra height value should be just bigger than the default leading
    height = recordedHeight + getTextFormat().leading + 1;
}

Additionally, we're adding few pixels extra the TextField default leading value plus 1 to the height there (discovered by Luke Sturgeon), it will prevent "vertical scroll on text select" bug described above.

How should I apply this fix to my broken TextField?
By creating a FixedTextField instance instead, exactly the same way as you would instantiate an ordinary TextField:

var textTF:FixedTextField = new FixedTextField();

Alternatively, you could clone an existing TextField by referencing to it:

var textFieldFixed:FixedTextField = new FixedTextField(someOtherTextFieldToClonePropertiesFrom);

In fact, you can even attach the TextField stored in the Flash IDE library (obviously wrapped up in a MovieClip symbol) – I wrote a separate blog post on that matter.

Download zipped demo including the FixedTextField class.

01:30 PM | | 22 Comments | Tags: , , , , ,

A TextField called Dolly

I love Flash IDE. Especially the way you can stylise the TextField – decide what glyphs to embed and what fonts to include, set line height (leading), kerning (letterSpacing), colours, etc. I really hate creating new TextFields from scratch, entirely in code.

Using Library to store a TextField
Unfortunately, we can't store a TextField directly as a Flash IDE library symbol, so we have to wrap it up in a MovieClip and reference to it as follows:

var textFieldNormal:TextField = new TextMC().textTF;

where TextMC is the library MovieClip symbol containing a TextField named textTF.

How to duplicate (clone) a TextField?
You can't do it natively in AS3. But you can do some magic instead – clone all (excluding read-only) properties of another TextField.

var description:XML = describeType(referenceTextField);

for each (var item:XML in description.accessor)  
{
    // clone passed textfield properties that are not read only  
    if (item.@access != "readonly") targetTextField[item.@name] = referenceTextField[item.@name];  
}

targetTextField.defaultTextFormat = referenceTextField.getTextFormat();

TextFormat of the referenceTextField won't be cloned with the loop above as it's not accessible via getter/setter/public methods. You have to clone it manually and this is what the last line does. It's very handy when you want to change the default kerning (letterSpacing) in Flash IDE and you want it to be preserved in your cloned text field.

I wrote a FixedTextField class that does that (plus fixes a couple of other TextField problems) – download zipped demo including the class.

01:00 PM | | 0 Comments | Tags: , , , , ,