Flash CS3 Documentation

Programming ActionScript 3.0 > Working with text > Example: Newspaper-style text formatting

Example: Newspaper-style text formatting

The News Layout example formats text to look something like a story in a printed newspaper. The input text can contain a headline, a subtitle, and the body of the story. Given a display width and height, this News Layout example will format the headline and the subtitle to take the full width of the display area. The story text will be distributed across two or more columns.

This example illustrates the following ActionScript programming techniques:

Extending the TextField class
Loading and applying an external CSS file
Converting CSS styles into TextFormat objects
Using the TextLineMetrics class to get information about text display size

To get the application files for this sample, see www.adobe.com/go/learn_programmingAS3samples_flash. The News Layout application files can be found in the folder Samples/NewsLayout. The application consists of the following files: <table updated: 6/20/2007>

File	Description
NewsLayout.mxml or NewsLayout.fla	The user interface for the application for Flex (MXML) or Flash (FLA).
StoryLayout.as	The main ActionScript class that arranges all the components of a news story for display.
FormattedTextField.as	A subclass of the TextField class that manages its own TextFormat object.
HeadlineTextField.as	A subclass of the FormattedTextField class that adjusts font sizes to fit a desired width.
MultiColumnTextField.as	An ActionScript class that splits text across two or more columns.
story.css	A CSS file that defines text styles for the layout.

Subtopics

Reading the external CSS file

Arranging story elements on the page

Altering font size to fit the field size

Splitting text across multiple columns

Flash CS3

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