[Flash8] measuring height and width of dynamic text using getColorBoundsRect

[tomsamson]

This code measures height and width of dynamic text using getColorBoundsRect:

import flash.display.BitmapData;
import flash.geom.Rectangle;
this.createEmptyMovieClip ("mc", 10);
var my_fmt:TextFormat = new TextFormat ();
my_fmt.font = "Arial";
my_fmt.size = 16;
mc.createTextField ("my_txt", 1, 100, 100, 200, 100);
mc.my_txt.multiline = true;
mc.my_txt.wordWrap = true;
mc.my_txt.type = "input";
mc.my_txt.text = "Type something here";
mc.my_txt.setTextFormat (my_fmt);
this.createEmptyMovieClip ("line1", 2);
line1.lineStyle (2, 0xff00ff, 100);
this.createEmptyMovieClip ("line2", 3);
line2.lineStyle (2, 0x00ffff, 100);
this.onEnterFrame = function () {
	var my_bmp:BitmapData = new BitmapData (480, 400);
	my_bmp.draw (mc);
	var cb:Rectangle = my_bmp.getColorBoundsRect (0xFFFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFFFF, false);
	//kill bitmap or run out of memory
	my_bmp.dispose();
	//draw lines
	line1.clear ();
	line1.lineStyle (2, 0xff00ff, 100);
	line1.moveTo (cb.x, cb.y);
	line1.lineTo (cb.x, cb.y + cb.height);
	line2.clear ();
	line2.lineStyle (2, 0x00ffff, 100);
	line2.moveTo (cb.x, cb.y);
	line2.lineTo (cb.x + cb.width, cb.y);
};

/*Message originally posted by tonypa on 09-14-2005 at 05:46 PM:,moved to own thread by tomsamson*/

[mr_malee]

does the code have to be that big. It looks quite ugly. Although i'm really hyped about this bitmap stuff, it looks very hard. Maybe after a few tries i'll get it down pat.

[tonypa]

Well, the code creates dynamic text area and draws the lines too. Without those its only 4 lines:

var my_bmp:BitmapData = new BitmapData (480, 400);
my_bmp.draw (mc);
var cb:Rectangle = my_bmp.getColorBoundsRect (0xFFFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFFFF, false);
my_bmp.dispose();

[mr_malee]

awesome, for some reason, looking at everyones code snippets about flash 8, people seem to be creating everything dynamically, this got me thinking that maybe the bitmap functions only worked with dynamically created instances. like "attachMovie". But thanks for clearing that up Tonypa

[Ray Beez]

I don't understand the point of this...? I just finished a project where I took in XML data and dynamically built a "page" of content inside a movieClip, using createTextField .

I think you are trying to address the bug where an MC's width and height property do not get updated when dynamic text resizes inside of it, right? But the workaround I had already found was to use createTextField and then the _width and _height properties of that new textfield DO work!

So in your example here, why aren't you just using mc.my_txt.text._height to determine the height of the newly created text?

???

[Santuria]

flash 8 is all too complicated

[iopred]

Yeah, im with Ray Beez, whats so wrong with ._height? Thats what I use, always works fine.

[tonypa]

But _height gives you height of text field, not actual text.

_root.createTextField("t",10,0,0,150,20);
trace(t._height);

It still have _height of 20 even when there is no text at all.

[iopred]

if you set the height of the field to 1, you can write stuff, it will then give you the height of the text.

[tonypa]

You srill cant find size of part of the text inside text field

Lets say you have text:
"Flash 8 is released"
And you have 8 in red, italic and 2 pt smaller then other text. How you find the height and width of that?

[iopred]

You cant, but looking at your method, you cant at the moment either...

[tonypa]

You have to modify color values in
getColorBoundsRect (0xFFFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFFFF, false);
to get other colors then black vs white.

I just dont know exactly how to do it yet

[lesli_felix]

I had to work this one out for a recent project, there's two height properties for a textfield:
textfield._height and textfield.textHeight

there's also:
textfield._width and textfield.textWidth

one for the box, and one for the text

both available from player version 6 ;-) though I only discovered them about three weeks ago.

[LittleRed]

lesli_felix - thank you, thank you, thank you - saying about textfield.textHeight has just saved me hours of torment.

[Sred]

Can someone post how it would be possible to use this function after css has been applied to the text?

[ImprisonedPride]

I'm not so sure I clearly understand the relevance of accomplishing this. Is this a common wall people hit? I don't see why you'd need to find the height of a word in a block of text?

[Sred]

it allows you to draw a box around your text that fits tighter than the regular textField (which has a 2pixel gutter space around it)

[VENGEANCE MX]

If you know the gutter space will always be 2 pixels, surely there wouldn't be this problem? Methinks that's not the case.

Plus, I'm pretty sure Flash can't use CSS. Don't see what your problem is.

[ImprisonedPride]

Isn't a gutter of 2px the minimum to NOT have the draw rectangle overlap the text itself?

[everfornever]

you can use CSS with flash, I do alot on my sites so the client can easilier update color patterns when updateing the text via notepad or xml, this helps so they dont need to know html, they juct open the CSS and edit the colors and sizes there.

As to the hieght of the text thing, I think what this is supposed to solve is when you createempty text field and say import text from notepad you need to know the height of the box, because if say a client inputs only one line or 10 lines, you want the box around to scale to it (I assume with 9 slice as well) so it comes out like it would in an html site, were you could have 3-4 boxes on the left that have a border, and also move up or down the page evenly as more text or less text is used.