Text Quality

[mark_anderson_u]

Hi All

I'm building a web site for a client and wanted to try and compare the building it in Flash vs. HTML. The biggest problem I have with HTML is that there is NO WAY (that I know of) to control the order in which elements appear on the page.

As an example, take a look at

http://www.michaela-yakov.com/english/home.html

I tried loads of different ways to get the colored blocks and lines to load first, but no luck (even when they're preloaded in the body's OnLoad event). Also the rollovers for the menu items are slow as hell, even though they're preloaded (with Dreamweaver macros).

So, I spent a considerable amount of time building the same page in Flash (with dummy menu items).

http://www.michaela-yakov.com/english/FlashHome.html

I was shocked to find out how BAD the text handling is.

Specifically,

The quality of the body text is very poor (is there a way to improve this?)

There are no special characters like bullets. I pasted in a solid bullet from MS-Word and got a hollow one.

I cant indent a para after a bullet (like a UL in HTML).

There are no paragraph spacing controls (just line spacing).

These are the first 3 things I found.

I believe that such a web site design (without using frames) is way more efficient, because most elements are loaded once (i.e. background) and the interaction and quality I can get is way superior.

BUT (and it's a big "but") what about text. After all, the web page is a vehicle for the customer's text, so how can I improve it.

I have another issue too, it has to be bi-lingual (English and Hebrew). No idea where to start with the Hebrew. I have Hebrew fonts installed, but all I get is roman type. Anyway, that's a whole other problem and whole other post!

Thanks in advance

Mark

[jimburton]

re your points, you can achieve crisper text by using system fonts (not an desirable option most of the time!), bitmap fonts (search this forum for links to free ones) or dynamic text, which is never anti-aliased. To use dynamic text, create a dynamic text field, give it a name and put this code on the first frame:

myTextField.text = "Hello, this is all the text etc etc";

By setting the text properties to html you can do some indenting and bullets etc, but it only speaks html 1.0. mx has a much more sophisticated way of creating and applying text formatting, which you can think of as a bit like css - check it out.

If you have the hebrew font on your machine, properly installed, you can use them in your movie and embed it, saving them it with the swf. If you downloaded it from somewhere, you then need to activate it by double-clicking on it in the fonts folder in explorer (if'n you is windows)

[mark_anderson_u]

Hi Jim

Thanks for the reply. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any good way of handling text formatting other than the regular text field formatting tools.

Is there something else I should be aware of?

Regards

Mark

[jimburton]

yes, the TextFormat object:

myNewFormat = new TextFormat([font, [size, [color, [bold, [italic, [underline, [url, [target, [align, [leftMargin, [rightMargin, [indent, [leading]]]]]]]]]]]]]);

myTextField.setTextFormat(myNewFormat);

this is a different issue from the 'crispness' one, but should give you control over the format.

[jimburton]

Plus, the reason I compared it to css is that you can alter the formatting at runtime however you like, by creating a new format or by altering and applying the existing one...