I've seen a lot of blog posts recently about usability in Flash, most of which are very negative, written by people who seem to have used earlier versions of Flash, and decided that nothing has changed. However, there is one thing that has kept me away from doing projects in Flash with a lot of text.

That one thing, is the browsers find function. I use the find function a lot. Often times I'm only looking for a portion of a page, and so I'll do a search on a key term. With Flash (and others, like OpenLaszlo, XUL, etc) the find won't work. Even when an OpenLaszlo program is converted to DHTML, find won't work on some items, because they're converted to images.

However, I think I've got a solution. I'd like to note first though, that this is currently a concept, and I haven't put in the testing legwork yet, though I plan to.

First, when the Flash file is generated, and the non flash version is created for those without Flash, add some javascript, that locates every character, word, etc, and stick it into an object.

Now, add a listener, that checks at a frequent interval for highlighted text.

setInterval(function() { var sel = window.body.getSelection(); if(sel.toString() != null) { window.document.getPageSelection.SetVariable = sel.toString(); } }, 100);

'getPageSelection' being the id of the Object holding the Flash file.

You'd then create a function to send this information to Flash (or have something set up to have Flash pull it in) In Flash you'd then create an object holding the text in the file (which, I believe could be done dynamically for most of the text in a file)

This object would probably need to be set up so that each letter would exist at a different spot in a multidimensional array, in this example, this would hold the information to find - "f-i-n-d" ->

var totalFlashText:Object = new Object(); totalFlashText["f"] = [ ["xs,ys,ws,hs,pages"] ["i", ["xs,ys,ws,hs,pages"], ["n", ["xs,ys,ws,hs,pages"], ["d", ["xs,ys,ws,hs,pages"], ] ] ] ];

Probably not something you'd like to do by hand, but, it seems to me possible to generate dynamically, and in the realm of possibility for Flash. When I get time to give it a shot, I'll flesh this out some more.