AS3: grouping sprites

Question

I have a handful of sprites that I am attempting to group together via addChild(). Here is some pseudo-code demonstrating what I would like to accomplish:

import nav.text.TextSprite; 

spr1:Sprite = new Sprite();
spr1.graphics.clear();
spr1.graphics.beginFill(0x000000);
spr1.graphics.drawRect(0,0,100,100);

txt1:TextSprite = new TextSprite;
txt1.text = "hello";

spr1.addChild(txt1);

//this is what isn't working:  the sprite is hidden but not the text
spr1.alpha = 0.0;

For some reason I cannot seem to get the TextSprite to draw correctly... All it is is a Sprite with a TextField added to it. I think everything is working there, but I might have something wrong w/r/t making sure all of TextSprites children are grouped correctly.

I should mention that it does position correctly; but the alpha property won't respond in the way I would expect it to. I.E., the sprite that the TextField is attached to will allow it's alpha to be set but the text remains visible.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Most likely you just need to embed the font in your textfield. Try changing the x, y of spr1 and see if txt1 moves along with it. If it truly is a child then it will respond to the new position.

Answer 2

You need to embed the font using textfield.embedFonts = true. If your text is disappearing when you do this, how are you going about embedding the font (using the Flex embed meta tag or using the Flash IDE?), check that you are not changing the font weight (setting the text to bold when you have only embedded the normal weight font) and if you are using a text format, be sure to apply the text format AFTER you set the textfield.text property. You can get around this by using textfield.defaultTextFormat.