Re: FLASH: Flash text handling isnt up to par.

[John Croteau]

Hi David,


> Any vector animation, Ive done has been with Flash, however Ive been testing a

> couple of this and in doing so created a column with about a hundred sentences.

> First of all the column by itself scoped a whooping 60 kb as swf! Also I found

> that Flash handles text like a kid with a double scoop ice cream cone on a hot day.

> If I move text out of the "view" screen in the symbol library it jumbles itself

> together.

Each Instance of a character in Flash 3 takes 2 bytes and spaces use 1

byte.

The shape to draw a character is typically 100-200 bytes, this is a one

time expense for each character in each font used. Typically 3K-5K per

font is used if most of the letters in the alphabet are used. Check your

report for the exact costs in your Movie.


> Because of this you cannot make long animated columns of text with FLash.

Yes you can. HTML is more efficient than Flash in handling text (1 byte

compared to 2) and has faster text handling. But you can use Flash to

handle text and include your choice of Fonts cheaper than downloadable

Fonts (for both MSIE and Netscape) if your are using less than about

1000 characters. This is because Netscape 4 and MSIE4 use different

downloadable font systems. Flash is much easier to use than downloadable

Fonts (so far) and works for version 3 & 4 browsers. I look forward to a

point in time that there is one downloadable Font system used for both

Netscape and MSIE, with DHTML layers working the same in both and of

course Flash working with the DHTML features in both browsers as well.

Currently only MSIE4 can be used with the advanced DHTML features such

as transparency. Maybe in the version 5 browsers? Please!!!


> Does anyone know why the file sizes are so large with Flash text compared to

> regular HTML?

There are costs to create text containers (paragraphs) and I have a

feeling that you have created a text container for each line. 

If your sentences are not extremely long winded then they are likely to

average about 40 characters and 11 words or about 90 bytes per sentence.

Or about 9K for Text placement and about 3K per font used or somewhere

between 12K and 13K if using a single font and only a few text

containers. If you are using dozens of Fonts and/or lots of text

containers (paragraphs) then you could easily increase this size to 60K

or more.


> Also does anyone know why FLash wont keep track of text moved off

> the screen? If I have a sentence longer than the viewing screen, Flash bunches

> it together.

Don't have or at least haven't had this problem.

Can you give us a step=-by-step to see if we can reproduce it?


> Also does Flash have margin setting?

Inside the Modify > Paragraph options there is margin and line spacing

settings.



> Anybody have any insight?

Occasionally.  :-)

All the byte costs that I have compiled for Flash 3 will be available in

the Flash Bible coming soon to a Web site near you.


-----------                               -----------------------

John Croteau

croteauerols [dot] com (mailto:croteauerols [dot] com)

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