Kevin Hoyt

Over the holiday season I’ve had a lot of opportunity to play with various ideas that have been running through my head of late. One of these, inspired by my wife and six-month old, was a text string dynamically wrapped around the perimeter of a circle. I did some looking on the web, and while there’s a good deal of references to “circle math” with ActionScript, I was unable to find anything in the way of working with text and a circle. Here’s a rough-in of my solution.

First and foremost is a special thanks to Cody Lindley for the refresher course on trigonometry as posted on ActionScript.org. Secondly note that this example is unfinished (outside of the core functionality) and is for use at your own risk.

My solution involves taking a string and iterating through the characters, creating a TextField for each as I go. I subsequently iterate through each of the created letters and position and rotate them accordingly. This of course involves embedding a font as otherwise dynamically created TextField’s will not render when rotated. And at the end of the day, the quality of the rotated font was a bit of a let down - something I’m hoping the new text rendering engine in Maelstrom will resolve.

If you have seen other examples of this type of dynamic wrapping of text to a curve, or if you make improvements to the code (which should be pretty easy to do) I’d love it if you left a note in the comments of this post. I have countless code snippets like this from across the Macromedia product line, so if something like this is valuable to you, I’d also appreciate it if you left a comment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 30th, 2004 at 9:33 am and is filed under Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.