What is it about the text that you want to control? I would think if the panel is a fixed width and you enter line breaks and spaces in the text, the text will have the correct line breaks and spacing.
You also have the option of loading the next page's image before someone opens to that page. It'll still hand if someone skips ahead, but will fool most folks who read sequentially. Alex Harui Flex SDK Developer Adobe Systems Inc.<http://www.adobe.com/> Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of brucewhealton Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2009 6:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [flexcoders] Feedback and ideas re: publishing a collection of poems Hello all, I started publishing a collection of poems for someone a while back when I was very much new to Flex. I chose to use an accordion component to hold one poem or a single page of a poem that spanned several pages. The accordion is contained in a Panel. Each group of 4 or 5 poems (less if the poem spanned several panes of the accordion) was placed in a custom component based on the Panel component. Poems 1-4 are in Panel 1, 5-8 Panel 2, etc. I also thought at the time that the only way to be sure that the text of the poems appeared the same way whenever viewed, was to have the text of the poem saved as a gif or png file. In order to keep the file size from not getting any larger, I did not embed the images. So, right now, on a little slower connection than my home computer (which connects at 16Mbps or so) when you click on the accordion pane to view the next pane, there is the wait while the next pane, the image, is being downloaded. This doesn't create a good user experience. Those were my thoughts and I wanted some feedback now, suggestions. First let me show you the site: http://wsmagazine.net/BirdsOfDjakarta/#<http://wsmagazine.net/BirdsOfDjakarta/> One option is to move the panel custom components into a separate file, an external file, and embed the images. That way when one is looking at pane 1 that has poems 1 - 4, one might have to wait for the panel to download but the user wouldn't have to wait when moving from poem 1 to 2 when viewing the same Panel. The other thought was to see if I could use a Text or TextArea component and see if is possible to ensure that the text displays exactly the same no matter how the website is being viewed. Can that be done? I mean poems need to break at a certain place any time it is viewed. If a different computer on the web could use a different font, then the lines may not break correctly - I'm not worried about spaces at the end of a line, I just don't want 2 lines where there was only one line. Can this be accomplished and if so how? Also, a nice effect would be to have the text scrolling automatically, but with controls added for the person reading the poem. This idea would allow for any one poem to fit in the same display area because overflow would just scroll into the viewing area. Again, see what I have done already, please, at: http://wsmagazine.net/BirdsOfDjakarta/ Thanks for any suggestions, and feedback. Bruce
