Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Flash Text

As noted in Chapter 3, Web browsers simply don’t offer a lot of font choices. Even though it’s possible to specify any font for your text, unless your visitors have the same font installed on their systems, they won’t see the font you intended.

For this reason, Web designers either stick to the handful of fonts that are commonly installed on Windows and Macintosh computers, or they render type as graphics and insert them in the page. This workaround has its own downsides, of course: graphics take longer to download, and you can’t edit the text once you’ve frozen it into a picture.

In an effort to give designers greater choices, Dreamweaver MX offers Flash text. Based on Macromedia’s successful Flash technology, Flash text is a text-only Flash movie on your Web page that maintains the shape and quality of any True Type font you have installed on your computer. It offers a number of benefits:

POWER USERS’ CLINICBehind Flash Buttons

You may be a little dismayed by either the limited number of styles available for Flash buttons, or the quality of the buttons’ designs. You may decide that none of the buttons match your site’s look, so why bother?

Fortunately, Flash buttons, like most features in Dreamweaver, are completely customizable. Each Flash button style is actually a Generator template. (Generator is a Macromedia product that can incorporate dynamic data, such as the time or weather, into a Flash movie, providing cutting-edge animation with up-to-the-minute information.) ...