Flash Animation 6: Using Text in Flash to Give Your Character a Voice

At this point you'll go through each frame and delete text until, on each new frame, a new letter appears. (It's almost like regular frame-by-frame animation, only without the hours and hours of drawing, retracing, page-flipping, and then cel-painting...okay, and the results are much more simple). I'd recommend working backwards, starting at your second to last frame (leave your last frame as-is, as it contains the completed text) and deleting progressively more as you work your way backwards: deleting the last character in the second-to-last frame, then deleting the last two characters in the third-to-last frame, until you've reached the first frame and should have a blank slate. I just delete my spaces along with the previous character as they come, so the spaces don't need their own frame.

If you scrub your timeline or just hit "Enter" you should be able to watch your text appearing smoothly, character by character. If your text is centered like mine, it also re-centers as each character is added, which adds another nice little effect. It came out a little bit jerky and odd with characters getting cut off on the edges, but I can adjust that easily with a little more time and tweaking.