Flash, ActionScript, Flash SEO

Have you ever run into this situation: using a dynamic text field for a mask with some letter spacing other than 0 and checked Auto Kern checkbox applied to the text field, adding some string value to the “text” property of the text field and after exporting the flash movie for Flash Player 8 and ActionScript 2, you see that the text you expect to show in the text field is not showing and the text field seems like it is empty?

I had exactly the same problem recently and found what causes it. Actually when you have a dynamic text field with checked Auto Kern and/or using Letter Spacing other than 0, immediately after you assign any value to the “text” property of the text field the field just “disappears”. So if you want to use auto kerning and/or letter spacing with dynamic text fields and plan to export the flash movie for Flash Player 8, you’d better use the TextFormat’s property “letterSpacing” and “kerning” (set to “true” for Auto Kerning)  like in the example:

var tf:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
 
tf.kerning = true;
 
tf.letterSpacing = 2;
 
myTextField.setNewTextFormat(tf);
 
myTextField.text = "Here goes the text";

Today I run into this strange problem while trying to scale a Sprite containing dynamic TextField. As you can see in the flash demo below, when you scale the Sprite the TextField retains its position in the Sprite container.

This is the code that I use for scaling: Read the rest of this entry »