Using the TextField class

You can use an instance of the TextField class to display text or create a text input field on the screen in Adobe® Flash® Player or Adobe® AIR™. The TextField class is the basis for other text-based components, such as the TextArea components or the TextInput components.

Text field content can be pre-specified in the SWF file, loaded from a text file or database, or entered by a user interacting with your application. Within a text field, the text can appear as rendered HTML content, with images embedded in the rendered HTML. After you create an instance of a text field, you can use flash.text classes, such as TextFormat and StyleSheet, to control the appearance of the text. The flash.text package contains nearly all the classes related to creating, managing, and formatting text in ActionScript.

You can format text by defining the formatting with a TextFormat object and assigning that object to the text field. If your text field contains HTML text, you can apply a StyleSheet object to the text field to assign styles to specific pieces of the text field content. The TextFormat object or StyleSheet object contains properties defining the appearance of the text, such as color, size, and weight. The TextFormat object assigns the properties to all the content within a text field or to a range of text. For example, within the same text field, one sentence can be bold red text and the next sentence can be blue italic text.

In addition to the classes in the flash.text package, you can use the flash.events.TextEvent class to respond to user actions related to text.