Formatting Dynamic Text Fields?

Does anyone know why after about Flash 6/AS 1.0 you can no longer format dynamic text by simply using the text field properties? And any ideas for a work-around? I have several dynamic text fields on a page, populated with text from a .txt file. The text file is created through an admin page using PHP so it seems a little tricky using an html rendering solution. The easiest solution was to set the text field properties in the flash movie with the knowledge that any dynamic text input would take on those same properties…

Any ideas would be welcome.