In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps required to install and use the TextArea component as an alternative to Flash’s native TextField class, and show you how to detect mouse roll over/out events on hyperlinks. I’ll also talk about how you can call custom functions and pass different data types as arguments.

Background

The native TextField class was the first to support text scripts in Flash projects. With TextField, you could support dynamic and static text, as well as the input type to allow user interactivity. It also supported a (very limited) selection of HTML tags for styling your scripts – but when comparing this narrow availability of HTML support in TextField to what is possible with regular HTML files being used within browsers, Flash developers felt the extreme lack of flexibility when dealing with text.

In 2009 when TLFTextField was introduced, developers were hoping to see some solutions – but these didn’t appear. Today, with the TextArea class, you can do what you always wanted with your text blocks. Functionalities like detecting roll over/out on href links, calling custom functions from text blocks, creating anchor links, loading custom created tags like video players, slideshow, and buttons: these are all now possible with TextArea.