AS3 TextHighlighter

June 22nd, 2009 • 14 comments ActionScript, Flash
Tags: ActionScript, AS3, Flash, TextField

Because of the lack of text highlighting capabilities for Flash TextFields I coded a small class with a simple API to highlight text with your custom style. For your own styles you just have to implement an interface. The highlight method takes either a String or Regular Expression as argument.

The class doesn’t work for scrolling text at the moment, but feel free to extend the class.

example:

Styling Html TextField Bullet Points

June 18th, 2009 • 12 comments ActionScript, Flash
Tags: ActionScript, AS3, Flash, TextField

If you ever needed to style the bullet points in a Html TextField in Flash you have noticed that this isn’t supported. It gets even worse if the bullet point in the font you’re using isn’t nice at all and you want to take another fonts bullet point.

But with a simple workaround you can change the font face, size and color of the bullet points:

And don’t forget to embed the bullet point, it’s character U+2022

Update 25.01.2010

Added an indent property to easily set the left margin of the list. For using other symbols than the bullet, you have to manipulate your font and embed the manipulated character.

Download Source

AS3 TextField metrics bug

April 9th, 2009 • 2 comments ActionScript, Flash
Tags: ActionScript, AS3, Flash, TextField

Just a quick reminder for myself. There are a few interesting metrics functions in the AS3 TextField API like getCharBoundaries(), but if you have an autoSize field the methods won’t work properly. Just set the height of the field before calling the method to fix that.

...
textfield.height = textfield.height;
textfield.getCharBoundaries(charIndex);
...

Flash Image Sequence Memory Issues

April 9th, 2009 • 3 comments ActionScript, Flash
Tags: ActionScript, AS3, BitmapData, Flash

I guess most of you are aware of the Bitmap memory leak in Flash Player and that you have to call the BitmapData.dispose() method to actually free the memory. But what to do if you don’t have a reference to the BitmapData?

That’s essentially a problem when dealing with MovieClips with an image sequence on its timeline. After adding the MovieClip to the stage and accessing each frame the complete sequence is in memory and removing it from the stage again doesn’t free any of this memory. Obviously the single frames are getting converted to Shapes with bitmap fill internally, so you don’t have a Bitmap instance for each frame and therefore you can’t dispose the frames after showing the sequence.

Sequence Example (the swf has no preloader, so you’ll probably have to wait a little bit)
Sequence Example Source (9MB, Flash CS3)

The only solution for this problem is to load the sequence as an external swf and call the unload method of your Loader instance when you don’t need the sequence anymore and want to free the memory. Alternatively you could load the single jpg frames individually, create your sequence programmatically and use BitmapData.dispose() afterwards.

Masking a 3D Container in AS3 (FP10)

February 16th, 2009 • 8 comments ActionScript, Flash
Tags: AS3, Flash

»Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity.« That’s one of the key features in FlashPlayer 10 according to Adobe. You might think: "Woohoo, that’s fantastic" … so did I. But actually this is not completely true.

I was trying to set a mask or the scrollRect-property of a Sprite and as long as you don’t use one of the new 3D properties (rotationX, rotationY, rotationZ, …) this works as supposed. After changing one of the 3D properties and therefore using the new 3D API the mask will not work anymore. Of course this is not mentioned in the FP10 AS3 reference.