How do I underline text in Flash MX?

Posted August 4, 2004

You’d think for how beloved of a program Flash is, you would be able to do something as simple as underline text. But no, it is something really complicated.

In order to underline text:

New Document in Flash.

Choose your text tool and draw a rectangle

In your properties inspector, select dynamic and give the text field a name “copy”.

Then, open the actions inspector

Type these lines of code

Copy.htmlText = “This is some random copy”
Strike = new TextFormat();
strike.underline = true;
strike.size = 12;
strike.font = “Arial”;
copy.setTextFormat(14, 20, strike);

There are other ways of doing this, using Flash’s capabilities to recognize basic HTMl in text fields, but this defines a style, sets the values and then sets the characters that should have the style applied to the text box.