I spent the weekend working in Flash. I love Flash when I get to work with it consistently, but when it’s been awhile, it makes me a little crazy, and in this case it was Actionscript 2 that someone else had originally coded, so the crazy went to 11.

This time I was having trouble with a scrolling text box that contains a LOT of information. For some reason the bottom half of the content wasn’t showing up, even though the box continued to scroll that far. I think I spent half an hour trying to figure out why it was doing that until I stumbled on an accidental fix–toggling the “Selectable” box in the textbox properties. Voila! Problem fixed, if not necessarily solved.

It bothers me that I don’t know exactly why it was only hiding the bottom half of the box. I know it was about the size of the box, not the lines of content–when I reduced the line-height, more text showed up, but not all. I suspect it has to do with the function that created the scrollbar, but having to unravel all those mathy variables–especially when AS3 is my native Actionscript language, not 2–is a task I just can’t motivate myself to tackle, so I’m going with the mystery fix.