ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Using the Text Layout Framework
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Padding changes in TLF 2.0
Formatting text with TLF
Flash Player 10 and later, Adobe AIR 1.5 and later
The flashx.textLayout.formats package contains interfaces and classes that allow you to assign formats to any
FlowElement in the text flow hierarchy tree. There are two ways to apply formatting. You can assign a specific format
individually or assign a group of formats simultaneously with a special formatting object.
The ITextLayoutFormat interface contains all of the formats that can be applied to a FlowElement. Some formats apply
to an entire container or paragraph of text, but do not logically apply to individual characters. For example, formats
such as justification and tab stops apply to whole paragraphs, but are not applicable to individual characters.
Assigning formats to a FlowElement with properties
Flash Player 10 and later, Adobe AIR 1.5 and later
You can set formats on any FlowElement through property assignment. The FlowElement class implements the
ITextLayoutFormat interface, so any subclass of the FlowElement class must also implement that interface.
For example, the following code shows how to assign individual formats to an instance of ParagraphElement:
var p:ParagraphElement = new ParagraphElement();
p.fontSize = 18;
p.fontFamily = "Arial";
Assigning formats to a FlowElement with the TextLayoutFormat class
Flash Player 10 and later, Adobe AIR 1.5 and later
You can apply formats to a FlowElement with the TextLayoutFormat class. You use this class to create a special
formatting object that contains all of the formatting values you want. You can then assign that object to the format
property of any FlowElement object. Both TextLayoutFormat and FlowElement implement the ITextLayoutFormat
interface. This arrangement ensures that both classes contain the same format properties.
For more information, see TextLayoutFormat in the ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform.
Format inheritance
Flash Player 10 and later, Adobe AIR 1.5 and later
Formats are inherited through the text flow hierarchy. If you assign an instance of TextLayoutFormat to a
FlowElement instance with children, the framework initiates a process called a cascade. During a cascade, the
framework recursively examines each node in the hierarchy that inherits from your FlowElement. It then determines
whether to assign the inherited values to each formatting property. The following rules are applied during the cascade:
1 Property values are inherited only from an immediate ancestor (sometimes called the parent).
2 Property values are inherited only if a property does not already have a value (that is, the value is undefined).
Last updated 6/6/2012
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