User Guide

976 Chapter 2: ActionScript Language Reference
TextSnapshot.setSelected()
Availability
Authoring: Flash MX 2004.
Playback: SWF files published for Flash Player 6 or later, playing in Flash Player 7 or later.
Usage
my_snap.setSelected(from:Number, to:Number, select:Boolean) : Void
Parameters
from
An integer that indicates the position of the first character of my_snap to select. Valid
values for
from are 0 through TextSnapshot.getCount() - 1. If from is a negative value, 0 is used.
to An integer that is 1+ the index of the last character in my_snap to be examined. Valid values
for
to are 0 through TextSnapshot.getCount(). The character indexed by the to parameter is
not included in the extracted string. If this parameter is omitted,
TextSnapshot.getCount() is
used. If this value is less than or equal to the value of
from, from+1 is used.
select A Boolean value that specifies whether the text should be selected (true) or
deselected (
false).
Returns
Nothing.
Description
Method; specifies a range of characters in a TextSnapshot object to be selected or deselected.
Characters that are selected are drawn with a colored rectangle behind them, matching the
bounding box of the character. The color of the bounding box is defined by
TextSnapshot.setSelectColor().
To select or deselect all characters, pass a value of 0 for
from and TextSnapshot.getCount() (or
any very large number) for
to. To specify a single character, pass a value of from+1 for to.
Because characters are individually marked as selected, you can issue this command multiple
times to select multiple characters; that is, using this command does not deselect other characters
that have been set by this command.
The colored rectangle that indicates a selection is displayed only for fonts that include character
metric information; by default, Flash does not include this information for static text fields. In
some cases, this behavior means that text that is selected won’t appear to be selected onscreen. To
ensure that all selected text appears to be selected, you can force the Flash authoring tool to
include the character metric information for a font. To do this, add a dynamic text field that uses
that font, select Character Options for that dynamic text field, and then specify that font outlines
should be embedded for at least one character. It doesn’t matter which characters you specify, nor
even if they are the characters used in the static text fields in question.
Example
The following example illustrates how to use this method. To use this code, place a static text field
containing the text “TextSnapshot Example” on the Stage.