Illustrator CS3 & Dynamic Text for Flash CS3

The integration between Illustrator and Flash has been hyped up with the release of Creative Suite 3. One of the things that is now possible to do with text in Illustrator is to make Flash text, or text that is ready to be used in Flash. Flash can create static, dynamic, and input text fields. Illustrator CS3 has the same capability and you can give the text fields instance names for scripting purposes.

So I tried creating a basic interface with buttons and some text fields. Then I saved the AI file and imported into Flash. When I test the Flash movie, I get the following error:

TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert flash.text::TextField@d18cef9 to flash.display.MovieClip. at flash.display::Sprite/flash.display:Sprite::constructChildren() at flash.display::Sprite$iinit() at flash.display::MovieClip$iinit() at menu2_fla::MainTimeline$iinit()

Even if I don't use any ActionScript to fill the dynamic text fields form an external text file, I still get this error.

If I just copy and paste ONLY the text fields from AI to FL, I do not get any errors and the ActionScript I wrote to fill the dynamic text fields works.

I have posted questions on several Adobe forums and asked others for help on this and so far, no response.

By the way, I have tried this on both Mac and PC platforms and the problem occurs on both. Does anybody have any ideas why this might happen?

Know How

A new feature in Illustrator CS3 called 'know how' is a great little tool for getting contextual help from Adobe on Illustrator. With the know how panel active, you can click on a tool in the toolbox and the know how panel will give you information about that tool. If you need to know more, you can click on the search button and more live articles become available from the Adobe website.

Very nice feature indeed.

+ Freehand RIP +

Not surprisingly, especially with the release of CS3, Freehand will go the way of PageMaker and many other products, as Adobe will no longer develop it. I've used Freehand, I've taught others how to use it and, honestly, I've never liked it.

It could be one of those things where I used Illustrator first and not Freehand and if it were the other way around, maybe I would've liked it. What I didn't like about it was that it just felt clunky. There were hundreds of palette's and features, but you had to seriously dig to find them.

I'm not going to miss it, will you?

CS3 30-day Trials now available!

http://www.adobe.com/special/try_buy/trial_availability.html