i have made a mask to cover an area of my page, but when i preview my page, the text is missing 
any help would be appreciated, if you wanna see my fla, its at http://vip3r.iwebland.com/temp/navigator.fla
thanx in advance,
vip3r
Zip your fla and upload it here. I canāt get to it by link for some reason.
here it is, thanx for helping
vip3r
You need to break apart your text for it to show. Select your text and hit CTRL+B twice to break it into fills instead of text.
crap. is there a way to put it back into text, so i could edit it when i want to or something?
Unfortunately, no. You will have to rewrite it then break it apart.
well, i have a news section on the thing i want to mask, so i donāt think that would workā¦ becuase i edit my news a lot, not only add to itā¦
guess im stuck in a corner, huh?
Why do you have it masked?
so i can scroll stuff on the pageā¦ do i even need a mask to do this?
In MX you can just use the scrollbar Component. No masking involved, just drag it and attach it to your TextBox.
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/dynamic_scroller.asp
Check out this tutorial to learn how to scroll dynamically loaded text. (easier to update the news file)
Then follow this next link and click on āSolve cache problems when loading a movieā
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/as_tricks.asp
The example is for loadMovie, but you can use it for loadVars (or whatever the function is for loading dynamic text) This tutorial allows the text to be updated everytime the viewer views the page, so it isnāt saved in cache and the user has to empty his/her browser cache.
ok, but im not really getting this stuff about loadvarsā¦ is it the same as loadmovie?
and i think you misinterperted what i said about what im maskingā¦ the other stuff needs to scroll off the page, while the others come in. The mask is there to hide the stuff that goes beyond the page boundaries.
thanx again,
vip3r
If you follow the first link I sent, it teaches you how to load text from an external .txt file. This makes it so much easier to update your news, because you just have to edit the .txt file, not the whole flash movie.
To load text, you need to use a function called loadVars (or is it loadVarsNum?), either way, the tutorial will explain:)
One problem isā¦if you load text from an external .txt file, the browser caches it, so if you change it and donāt clear your cache, it wonāt show the update.
The second link I sent you tells you how to fix that problem.
<B>EDIT:</B> Oh, sorry, I posted this before I saw your update. I understand what the mask is for now. Hmmm, how to fix that?
actually, that still helps. thanx, i now have a dynamic text loading news thing 
and im still stumped about how to fix it. searching google right nowā¦
Awesome!
google isnāt helping muchā¦
some help would be nice, still having the problem!
thanx in advance,
vip3r
Hey I just found out a couple days ago how to do this.
Select your textbox and hit CTRL+F3 to open up the āPropertiesā window. You will see a button that says āCharacterā¦ā, click on this and it will bring up a window that says āEmbed Font Outlines For:ā then choose the option for āAll Charactersā
This will anti-alias your text, but it is better than nothing. Works great though.
the antialiasing is a pain, but if you choose your fonts well it wont be that dramatic.
As a note, embeding a whole font, on average, adds about 35-45 k to your project. If you want to reduce that, try to find ways in which you can just embed the symbols, or lower cases or whatever. Each reduction will bring the k down a little.
I read somewhere (I think in action script the definitive guide) that if you have a dynamic text box with a font embeded, you still need to set any other dynamic text boxes in the same given situation to embed as well. ieā¦ embeding it in one text field does two thingsā¦ it included the font outlines in the swf AND it sets THAT ONE text field to use the outlines. Another text fieldā¦ even of the same font, in a mask, though the font is embeded, is not set to use those outlines until you embed it in that text field as well.
Basicalyā¦ if ever you donāt see the text, try embeding it to see if that helps. Do a test with it embeded and not embeded so that you can see exactly how much file size is added to your project.
Good point about the file size increase, but I think if you are using your dynamically imported text as a news log you should keep it as all characters, that way you are safe no matter what the situation. This is just my opinion though.
I tend to agree. Plus the swf will be loaded into the cache once. If the visitor revisits the site and the txt file has changed, it wont matter all that much because he wont be downloading the font again.
Anothing thing I failed to clarify above: When I said it does two things: embeds the font in the swf AND sets that text box to use the outlinesā¦ I also said that you needed to do it on each text box in your production that is in the same situation. By embeding it a second time in a new text field it does NOT add to the file size. The font outlines are only included in the swf one time no matter how many text fields you set to embed that font.
It seemed to me that I implied differently in my first post.
as another note
When we start playing around with these things we will find that we are loading swfs into other swfs as well as those text files and xml files and other server side stuff.
If you make two different FLA files and each one has an embeded font in itā¦ each one will have that 45 k added to itās file size. Once this starts happening, you should start thinking about the concepts of Flashās āShared Librariesā. These are FLA files that are published to SWF which contain nothing but library elements. They in turn are called upon by other SWF productions using the āShared Libraryā methods in the menu options.
Iāll try to find out the full scoop on shared libraries for a new thread. I think that they should be detailed, and I donāt think that weāve talked about them here at kirupa very much if at all.
