Dynamic Text In Flash

Dynamic Flash doesn’t have to hurt, I promise.

Let’s face it, as a designer you probably don’t have time to make minor updates to every web site you’ve ever worked on, which means you have to make this process as easy as possible for your clients. This is why we create dynamic sites. I’ve seen countless tutorials explaining dynamic text in Flash go on and on for pages with several necessary companion files, all of which are overkill. In a few painless steps (six, in fact) you can make updating the copy of your Flash movie as uncomplicated as editing a .txt file.

1. Create a .txt file with your text to be dynamically loaded, and name it mytext. At the beginning of this text type: textField= You have now declared a variable name for this text. What’s a variable? A variable is a container that holds information, such as a name, a URL, or whether or not a button’s been clicked.
2. Create a new Flash movie, and save it in the same folder as your .txt file. With the text tool in the toolbar, draw a new text field onto the stage.
3. In the properties inspector change the drop down on the left from Static Text to Dynamic Text. Make sure you’ve selected Multiline and not Single Line, and Anti-alias for readability. You don’t need to Anti-alias for bitmap fonts, but that’s another tutorial.
4. Again in the properties inspector type textField in the Var field. You’ve now assigned a variable name to this text field, this must be the same name you assigned in your .txt file.
5. Create a new layer on the main timeline called Actions. Select the first frame, and open the Actions panel (F9.)
6. Type: loadVariables("mytext.txt", this) You can also choose Global Functions > Browser/Network and doubleclick loadVariables, and then type mytext.txt into the parantheses. You must include quotation marks around the name of your text file. This tells Flash to load mytext.txt into this timeline.

That’s it. Test your movie, and you should see the text from your .txt file in your flash movie. If not, go back to your movie and make sure you have the text set to a color that contrasts with your background color. Flash does have limited support of basic html tags within .txt files, but it’s buggy at best in MX 2004. If you’re using Flash 8, the Flash Player 7 narrowly supports CSS. Whatdoiknow.org lists the supported CSS properties. Check back for follow up tutorials on how to embed fonts in Flash, and using Flash’s XML Object for parsing. As always, if you have any problems or comments feel free to email me at bethdean (at) designorati (dot) com.

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