Easy flash question? Text buttons.

[Steve K]

I'm making a flash movie that has 7 text buttons the user can click.
When they roll over one of these buttons a sub-menu appears to the right
of that button with maybe 6-8 more text buttons the user can then click.

So basically I've created about 40-50 text buttons that all live in the
library.

Today, my supervisor comes in and she doesn't like how the font or size
is looking on the web. She wants it a little larger, and maybe a
different font.

I must have made this movie wrong from the start because that means I
have to go edit every Up, Over, Down, and possibly, Hit state for each
button?

Because if I edit the first state (Up), like change the size of the
font, change it's typeface, etc., the next state (Over) is still the old
style. So I have to change all three states to get the text to where my
supervisor wants it.

That means over 150 changes!

What did I do wrong? Isn't there an easier way to make a change once to
a symbol and have it change in all three states automatically?

As you can see, I'm quite new to Flash.

What I did was type out the word or words for the button, Converted to
Symbol, chose button, and then double clicked the word and went through
the Up, Over, Down, Hit for each button. I did this about 40-50 times
for each separate button, cause none of them are the same.

Thanks!!
Steve

[Andrew Bullock]

You sould have written the text, and converted it to a graphic.
then convert this graphic into a button instance. Then you only have to
change one instance of text for each button.

Better still you should have made a movie clip containing a dynamic text
field. on the layer above the text place a button with only a hit frame.

then you can use actionscript (duplicatemovieclip) to duplicate one
instance of the button and then change its text by
<buttonName>.<txtfieldname>.text = "my button 1";

this way you only have to make one change, to one button, and your
filesize is considerably reduced.

Andrew



Steve K wrote:

> I'm making a flash movie that has 7 text buttons the user can click.
> When they roll over one of these buttons a sub-menu appears to the right
> of that button with maybe 6-8 more text buttons the user can then click.
>
> So basically I've created about 40-50 text buttons that all live in the
> library.
>
> Today, my supervisor comes in and she doesn't like how the font or size
> is looking on the web. She wants it a little larger, and maybe a
> different font.
>
> I must have made this movie wrong from the start because that means I
> have to go edit every Up, Over, Down, and possibly, Hit state for each
> button?
>
> Because if I edit the first state (Up), like change the size of the
> font, change it's typeface, etc., the next state (Over) is still the old
> style. So I have to change all three states to get the text to where my
> supervisor wants it.
>
> That means over 150 changes!
>
> What did I do wrong? Isn't there an easier way to make a change once to
> a symbol and have it change in all three states automatically?
>
> As you can see, I'm quite new to Flash.
>
> What I did was type out the word or words for the button, Converted to
> Symbol, chose button, and then double clicked the word and went through
> the Up, Over, Down, Hit for each button. I did this about 40-50 times
> for each separate button, cause none of them are the same.
>
> Thanks!!
> Steve