Basic Tutorial

 

  1. Drag an instance of your MulticolumnTextField component onto your stage. Select the component instance and launch the component parameters panel. Adjust the component instance as detailed below.

    select instance     launch component parameters



  2. The component parameters panel will now open. In the text entry field type your content (you need to type enough to fill more than one column).

    enter content



  3. Test your movie and you'll see that the component has created columns for you based on its default settings.

 

 

 

EXPLANATION OF PARAMETERS - CONTENT

fig.1


A - Use these tabs to switch between content and style panels.

B - Type your content here. Alternately copy the content into the panel by copying the content from elsewhere on your computer and control+click (mac) or right-click (windows) and selecting paste.

C - Check this box if you want to use html formatting and you also want the component to ignore white space in the html formatting.

D - Check this box if you want the component to recognise html formatting in your content.

 

EXPLANATION OF PARAMETERS - STYLE

fig.2


A - Use these tabs to switch between content and style panels.

B - Enter the name of your font here.

C - Check this box if you wish to use embedded fonts (the font must be embedded elsewhere in the .swf, see Using Embedded Fonts for more information).

D - Enter a value in pixels for the size of your text.

E - Enter a value in pixels for your leading.

F - Enter the color of your type here in hex format (eg. 000000 for black, FFFFFF for white) or click the sample box and pick a color.

G - Check here for bold type

H - Check here for italic (or oblique) type

I - Check here to precede paragraphs with a bullet

J - Check here to underline your type

K - Select an alignment for your column(s).

L - Enter a value in pixels to indent the first line of each paragraph

M - Enter a value in pixels for the left hand margin of each column.

N - Enter a value in pixels to indent each line in each paragraph contained in the columns.

O - Enter a value in pixels for the right hand margin of each column.

P - Check here to give your columns a background fill

Q - Enter the color of your column backgrounds here in hex format (eg. 000000 for black, FFFFFF for white) or click the sample box and pick a color.

R - Check here to give your columns a border.

S - Enter the color of your borders here in hex format (eg. 000000 for black, FFFFFF for white) or click the sample box and pick a color.

T - List x axis co-ordinates in pixels separating multiple values with a comma (,). If the length of this list is less than the number of columns generated each column will take the x position of the previous column plus it's width, plus it's gutter.

U - Enter the maximum number of columns you want the component to create. This value does not necessarily indicate the number of columns generated; if there is insufficient content to require the number of columns specified the component will stop generating columns.

V - List y axis co-ordinates in pixels, separating multiple values with a comma (,). If the length of this list is less than the number of columns generated the final value in the list will be defaulted to.

W - Enter a value in pixels for the width of your columns.

X - Enter the height of your columns in pixels. Separate multiple values with a comma (,). If the length of this list is less than the number of columns generated the final value will be defaulted to.

Y - Check this box, to ignore the height input, and have the component set the height of your columns automatically.

Z - Enter a value in pixels for the space between your columns along the x axis. This value will only be used if you do not specify the x position for each column.