Question

I have the following code in AS3:

var str:String = '<TEXTFORMAT LEADING="2"><P ALIGN="LEFT"><FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="12" COLOR="#000000" LETTERSPACING="0" KERNING="0">Lo<FONT COLOR="#0000FF">re<FONT FACE="GG Superscript">m</FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="GG Superscript"> Ip</FONT><FONT COLOR="#990000"><FONT FACE="GG Superscript">su</FONT>m i</FONT>s simply dummy text </FONT></P></TEXTFORMAT>';

trace('BEFORE: '+str);

txt.htmlText = str;

trace('AFTER: '+txt.htmlText);

The problem I am facing is that the BEFORE and AFTER trace texts are very different. They are as follows:

BEFORE Trace

<TEXTFORMAT LEADING="2">
    <P ALIGN="LEFT">
        <FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="12" COLOR="#000000" LETTERSPACING="0" KERNING="0">Lo
            <FONT COLOR="#0000FF">re
                <FONT FACE="GG Superscript">m</FONT>
            </FONT>
            <FONT FACE="GG Superscript"> Ip</FONT>
            <FONT COLOR="#990000">
                <FONT FACE="GG Superscript">su</FONT>
                m i
            </FONT>
            s simply dummy text 
        </FONT>
    </P>
</TEXTFORMAT>

AFTER Trace

<TEXTFORMAT LEADING="2">
    <P ALIGN="LEFT">
        <FONT FACE="Arial" SIZE="12" COLOR="#000000" LETTERSPACING="0" KERNING="0">Lo
            <FONT COLOR="#0000FF">re
                <FONT FACE="GG Superscript">m
                    <FONT COLOR="#000000"> Ip
                        <FONT COLOR="#990000">su
                            <FONT FACE="Arial">m i</FONT>
                        </FONT>
                    </FONT>
                </FONT>
            </FONT>s simply dummy text 
        </FONT>
    </P>
</TEXTFORMAT>

It seems htmlText is rearranging the html tags. Even though the output is the same, I need the original html back since I am making a text editor and the AFTER htmlText is messing up my tag calculations. Any ideas what can be done here?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Is there a project requirement for using <FONT> tags for styling? Support for styling with basic HTML tags is very limited and buggy in Flash TextFields. I highly recommend using CSS to format your text using the flash.text.Stylesheet class. You’ll find it’s much more reliable, and your code will be cleaner.

Check out this tutorial for a clean implementation of CSS in TextFields.