ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Using the TextField class
Formatting text
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
You have several options for programmatically formatting the display of text. You can set properties directly on the
TextField instance—for example, the TextFIeld.thickness, TextField.textColor, and TextField.textHeight
properties.Or you can designate the content of the text field using the htmlText property and use the supported
HTML tags, such as b, i, and u. But you can also apply TextFormat objects to text fields containing plain text, or
StyleSheet objects to text fields containing the htmlText property. Using TextFormat and StyleSheet objects provides
the most control and consistency over the appearance of text throughout your application. You can define a
TextFormat or StyleSheet object and apply it to many or all text fields in your application.
Assigning text formats
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
You can use the TextFormat class to set a number of different text display properties and to apply them to the entire
contents of a TextField object, or to a range of text.
The following example applies one TextFormat object to an entire TextField object and applies a second TextFormat
object to a range of text within that TextField object:
var tf:TextField = new TextField();
tf.text = "Hello Hello";
var format1:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
format1.color = 0xFF0000;
var format2:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
format2.font = "Courier";
tf.setTextFormat(format1);
var startRange:uint = 6;
tf.setTextFormat(format2, startRange);
addChild(tf);
The TextField.setTextFormat() method only affects text that is already displayed in the text field. If the content
in the TextField changes, your application might need to call the TextField.setTextFormat() method again to
reapply the formatting. You can also set the TextField defaultTextFormat property to specify the format to be used
for user-entered text.
Applying cascading style sheets
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
Text fields can contain either plain text or HTML-formatted text. Plain text is stored in the text property of the
instance, and HTML text is stored in the htmlText property.
You can use CSS style declarations to define text styles that you can apply to many different text fields. CSS style
declarations can be created in your application code or loaded in at run time from an external CSS file.
Last updated 6/6/2012
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