r3dux.org

Week 7 of the ActionScript intro yet again carries on with the theme of coding rather than just talking about coding and yet again comes as a document instead of slides. All the text output we’ve been using so far has been to the debug console, which a.) is only useful for debugging, b.) is only visible in a web browser to people using the debug version of the flash plugin and c.) looks rubbish. So to remedy this, we’ll be looking at TextFields and TextFormats, and how we can use them to display text of any size, colour, font, orientation etc, and even generate random text formats.

In this bundle I’ve combined both Week 7 Lessons 1 and 2 into a single document and provided the full source code to the exercises, but it’s recommended that you work through it yourself instead of just copying and pasting the code, ya dig?

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to build a font clock like this, not that you’d particularly want to (because this melon is for display purposes only =P) – but you get the gist:

That’s got to just about cover most of the things you might want to do with text (i.e. choose a font, a colour, a size, a location, and an orientation).

Download link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 7 (both lessons combined)
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables, functions, objects and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: PDF
Content License: The document, its contents and the provided source code is released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and comes with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort. The Adobe Quickstart PDF was printed from content created and owned by the Adobe Corporation and the subway font used in the font-embedding example was created by Johan Waldenstrom (great font, Johan!).

Comments & feedback always welcome.

Clever…

• Rules of Thumb is a site all about user-contributed rules to use as a guide for things, covering everything from winning at Blackjack (Assume that any unseen card is an 8.) to knowing if you’re being followed (Make a right turn, and then make another right turn. If they’re still back there after the third right turn, you’ve got a problem.) to… well, you get the idea!




• Because E = Mc² (i.e. mass is energy), a spinning object must have more mass than a non-spinning object. And it does… Only we were wrong about how much more mass it has. By a factor of 100 million trillion…. This also has the side-effect of breaking the General Theory of Relativity. Whoops!
• Cryptome recently got taken off the net (but is now back) for publishing the Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook, or in other words, what Microsoft will reveal to the police about you, if they’re as much as asked. Read the handbook here, or more about the entire leak ==> smackdown here.
• A list of the 100 best free & online documentaries. I’ve got to own up and say I’ve only ever seen a couple of these, but some of them look really interesting so I’m definitely gonna try and watch some more when I’ve got the time.
• How to spell commonly misspelled words. Currently, due to the nature of the classes I’m teaching, I end up having to type committee (double everything), necessary (one c, two s‘s), and receive (reverse the i before e) a lot. IMHO it’s essential reading.
• Some good reasons to stop linking to Wikipedia as much. I grudgingly (because it’s more work for me) agree with his reasoning on the matter. Oh wells, ignorance was bliss… (discovered whilst reading this – credit where it’s due).
• Ever want to clean up large swathes of ASCII text so that it’s nicely formatted automagically? cleantext.org to the rescue…
• What the hell’s the deal with the economy? Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay aims to put you straight without putting you to sleep. Definitely on my wishlist.