Tutorial - Loading Text into Flash Dynamically

Loading Text into Flash Dynamically
Views: 8522
Date Added: 28-07-2007
Category: Actionscript

Loading Text into Flash from an external txt file

Sometimes it becomes necessary for text in a particular section of your Flash site to be updated frequently. You could, of course make these changes in your Flash file and republish the movie every time there is an update. But this can be time consuming and more than that there is another easier and efficient way to update text content externally.

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate one such method to dynamically load text from an external file into the Flash. Alright, let’s start then!

Step 1

First up, we are going to load text into the following window. (Note: This is just a graphic, you could create your own window and follow along!)

Right click on the image and copy it to your clipboard. Now open up Flash and create a new document of size 300x300px. Rename “Layer 1” to ‘frame’ and go to Edit>Paste to paste the graphic onto your stage.

Step 2

Now create a new layer above the frame layer and call it ‘dynamic text’. Grab the text tool and type in some place holder text on this layer as shown. Don’t worry, what you type here is not going to appear on the final output. Just make sure that your text box is at the right place and is big enough to load whatever content you need to.

Now keeping the text box selected change its properties on the properties panel to that shown below:

Now if you are using Arial for the text you should be okay, but if you plan to use any fancy fonts for the dynamic text you should embed them within the flash file so that they show up correctly even on systems that doesn’t have these fonts installed. To embed the font click on the embed button in the properties panel and choose the following characters to embed and click OK.

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