Using an undocumented feature of Director you can obtain the vertexlist property list necessary to map out a string of text in a vector cast member. It must be pointed out that the feature is undocumented and therefore unsupported. Considering that some supported functions in Director have their limitations/bugs, then use this at your own peril! I can tell you now that spaces aren’t welcome with this feature, and too many characters in your string of text will result in a script error. Simple use of the function does produce some interesting (and reliable) results though.
Embed a font into director in the usual way and use the line:
pvList = member (1).generateOutlines("Liquid")
This will only work if member 1 in your cast is a font member. If you’ve chosen a different cast member for your font, then simply alter the code accordingly.
PvList will now store a rather complex set of property lists in the form of [[#vertex: point(190.0000, 0.0000)], [#vertex: point(190.0000, -81.0000)], [#vertex: point(126.0000, -81.0000)], [#vertex: point(126.0000, -405.0000)], [#newCurve], and so on… ]
Each of the #vertex properties represents a vector point, and #newcurve means just as it says - where to begin a new curve in the string.
Create a blank vector member called “vec” in your cast and use the lingo:
member ("vec").vertexList = pvList
All being well, the vector member should now contain the outline of the text. It will behave like a normal vector member. The great thing about the vector shape is that you will be able to stretch it, flip it, fill it, un-fill it and generally do all the things that simple text members won’t let you do.
The example code and shockwave movie show an example of taking the vertexlist of a string of text and then writing it, point by point to a blank vector member. In this case, I’ve used the webdings character set, picking a letter at random and drawing the resulting character out point by point.
