Selectable Flash text or lack of

View the following first: http://designing.aiga.org/static/why.html

At the AIGA, they posted this 12-step problem solving process, but they don’t give you a list that is selectable so that you can copy it to one’s clipboard and insert it into a text document. What kind of design is that? Maybe it's great visual design.

Maybe they want us to type out the process stage so that it’s a learning process. I doubt this though. My guess is that the creator made the text in Photoshop and didn’t want to create the text boxes and retype it in Flash. It also could be, because Flash does a decent job of kerning, but not as good as Adobe. They would have to embed the fonts in the swf, too. An XML format of the information would be nice. . . Many of the prospective employer's web sites that I've visited have their contact information as a graphic which prevents copying the phone number or address to the clipboard. Does anyone else use the clipboard this much?

So that begs the question, how much intellectual property control one should keep? If one doesn’t make the text selectable, then for a viewer to post it on their blog they would have to retype it. Is this bad? I guess it depends on whether a link to the source is given. That would increase viewers of the original site. It seems that online the less control you have over your content, the more popular you become.

I have to admit though that I have outlined text inside a Flash website to keep the text justified, since dynamic text boxes in flash can’t justify (even with CSS!). That was made possible by importing a CS AI document into Flash. For some reason text is often corrupted when using the Photoshop->Fireworks->Flash process which is the process to use for images.

Anyone else realize that there are problems with copying text from multiple textbox PDFs. The selections are guided by either the Z-index or the chromological order of textboxes' placement. That's another topic.

--Stephen
www.smjdesign.com