/Flash/ Styling with CSS and Flash

06/07/2007 | Filed under Develop > Flash

Paul Wyatt shows you how to use external CSS and text files to produce interactive web content, and how to create a preloader for dynamically loading JPEG images

A few years ago, editing text was a battle in Flash. Formatting and tweaking was always done within the application itself, so Flash designers would be called on to update text boxes within their Flash masterpieces – the source file would have to be opened, the copy tweaked and styled using Flash tools, and a new SWF file exported. This became further complicated and more of a chore if you had to change images as well, as these would have to be updated in a similar fashion.

Over the last few years, there’s been light at the end of the tunnel. HTML formatted text can now be loaded into a dynamic Flash text field. In Flash Player 7 and above you can embed a variety of image formats such as JPEG, GIF and PNG, plus SWF files and movie clips. Text will even wrap around images in the same way it does on a regular HTML page.

The crisp, clean and elegantly styled text that Flash produces can now be dynamically loaded into Flash, formatted with HTML, then styled with an external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). The latter can be used to group style rules, which can be applied to HTML or XML elements.

About the author:

Name: Paul Wyatt
Site: www.paulwyatt.co.uk
Areas of expertise: Website design, Flash, animation, interactive design and motion graphics
Clients: 2Entertain, Lycos Europe, Smirnoff, Universal, Five
I’d most like to meet: Keith Richards would be good for a laugh

Click here to download the support files
Click here to download tutorial PDF