# Masking externally loaded dynamic text with external CSS applied.. (hlp)

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/masking-externally-loaded-dynamic-text-with-external-css-applied-hlp/164916>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [October 6, 2005, 12:07am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/masking-externally-loaded-dynamic-text-with-external-css-applied-hlp/164916 "2005-10-06T00:07:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Samantha\_Gram](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/da6949/32.png) [@Samantha\_Gram](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/Samantha_Gram)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2005, 12:07am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/masking-externally-loaded-dynamic-text-with-external-css-applied-hlp/164916/1 "2005-10-06T00:07:50Z")

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Hello everyone, new poster here and l’ve got a question.  
Now l’ve read the tutorials here and have been following along fairly well, but a problem has come up and l was wondering if anyone could help me out a bit here. or perhaps tell me some alternate methods used as ‘industry standards’.

l’m working on a full flash website and have come to a spot where l’d like to have the following things happening…

text loaded externally from a .txt file (no problem)  
css loaded in for the text from a .css file (no problem)  
then mask the textbox that contains this information (slight problem).

Here’s a zip with the source files of my example (4 total):  
[http://www.angelfire.com/creep2/samanthagram/mask\_css.zip](http://www.angelfire.com/creep2/samanthagram/mask_css.zip)  
and here’s the resulting flash file:  
[http://www.angelfire.com/creep2/samanthagram/test.swf](http://www.angelfire.com/creep2/samanthagram/test.swf)  
(give it a moment to load angelfire is slow - you may need to cut and paste the URLs into your browser window as angelfire also won’t let you direct link :-p )  
now everythings working ‘okay’… here’s what l’ve done.

Loaded in the external text…  
loaded in the external css…

applied the css/text to the text area (which is inside of a movie clip).  
Placed my “mask” layer over top of this movie clip and used actionscript:  
main\_mc.setMask(mask\_mc);

to make a mask out of the “mask\_mc”…  
problem is that it is masking the entire bounding box of the mask\_mc… is there a way around this, other than complicated mathimatical equations?

I have thought for certian l’ve seen dynamically loaded external content with CSS applied to it on other full flash sites (couple on [templatemonster.com](http://templatemonster.com) l’m sure) that are masked with “unique” shapes… how is this done, if l’m not mistaken. any help would be greatly appriciated. Thanks for your efforts and your time.

Samantha Gram.