linkable dynamic text (long post)

[antibot]

hello friends.
i'm a newbie to both flash and this board,
but was hoping to get some help.

this should probably be more than one post but whatever, it makes sense for it all to be together.

am trying to make my first website a little more interactive
and have decided to do so via a flash based scrollable text box.

have finally made one after scouring the net for help.
am using MX (not 2004) and i didn't use the scrollbar component, i used my own graphics and i made them into buttons. everything works, but i just want the whole thing to be a little more functional.
one annoying thing is that i don't have a little scrollbar guy- i just have
the buttons, so it looks like i'm missing something. is there an easy way to throw this in?

the main thing i'm concerned with is the ability to include hyperlinks within the text (text and image). i tried clicking the 'render text as html' button in the property inspector and including a basic HREF tag surrounding a word, but when i exported the movie, it didn't work- it actually cut off a bunch of the text.

the plan is to import the scrollable text movie into dreamweaver and have it 'just work'.

anyone have n-e-pointers?
this is all still pretty new to me.

please help guys.

[Richard_N]

quick answer to the cut off text, I would guess you have a "&" sign in there, flash will treat this as the start of an external variable and truncate at that point.

[antibot]

no, no & sign anywhere in the text.
any other ideas?

cheers

[Richard_N]

so is this text being called in externally or embedded in the flash movie?

dynamic or static text box?

at what point does the text cut off, at the a href would seem to be suggested?

What HTML tags are you using flash only supports the basic ones?

Does the text show up fully if the render as HTML is turned off?

[antibot]

yeah, so all i did was create a dynamic text area an fill it and at one point,
something like this happened:

so blah blah blah jimmy met johnny at
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/"> A Bowling Alley! </a>

have tried it both with and without the render text as html thing but it's always the same result. the text also seems to cut off long before the code as well, which is kind of weird.

also tried capitalizing HREF, but that didn't do anything.
so yeah, the idea is that someone scrolls down through the text, and within that scrollable area there is a link, so i guess it is embedded within the movie.

any ideas?

[Richard_N]

OK tried it here, just make sure the text box is set to static text, dont put an <a href=etc> in, just highlight the text to be hyperlinked and set the link http://www.example.com in the properties panel. To distinguish it, make it a different colour or something.

[edited by: BlobFisk at 8:43 am (utc) on June 15, 2005]
[edit reason] Changed to example.com (foobar.com exists!) [/edit]

[antibot]

...right. but if the text is static, then it doesn't scroll.
and if i create the link within the static text, there doesn't seem to
be a way to revert to dynamic text.

anyone?

[Richard_N]

a static text box is one that does not require info eiher to be input or called from elsewhere it has no bearing on the scrolling or not... Look oin the properties panel top left, define as static.

Jut embed this in a movie clip and scroll the movie clip

[antibot]

ok.
how do i do that?
am not using any masks, i'm just keeping the text box at
a certain size.

[Richard_N]

sorry i started this :-)

OK create an empty movie clip, put the text box in that (registration points x=0 y=0)

Drag an instance of this clip onto the stage, give it a name and make the scroll controller you created point to the instance name... ie scrollcontrol_mc.textbox_mc. etc etc

You will then need to mask off the textbox_mc to only show what you require to be visible at any one time.

et voila!

[edited by: BlobFisk at 9:12 am (utc) on June 16, 2005]

[Flashbloke]

Hi Antibot.

You were almost there. The problem was that you were using double speech marks. This is why your text was cutting off and why the link wasn't working.

Instead of using:
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/"> A Bowling Alley! </a>

Use
<a href='http://www.microsoft.com/'> A Bowling Alley! </a>

I've experimented with this using the 'render as html' option in Flash and it works.