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mc._height

Description

The floating-point _height property is a nonnegative number specifying the height of mc, in pixels. If mc has no content, _height is 0. The _height property measures the content of a clip as the distance between the topmost occupied pixel and the bottommost occupied pixel, even if there is empty space between those pixels. An occupied pixel is a pixel that contains a shape, graphic, button, movie clip, text field or other content element. Changes made to a clip's height in the authoring tool or via _yscale are reflected by _height.

Setting the value of _height resizes a movie clip vertically. Attempts to set _height to a negative value are ignored. Setting a clip's _height to 0 does not make it invisible; rather, the clip becomes a one-pixel horizontal line. Flash's basic unit of measure is a twentieth of a pixel (a "twip"), so the smallest legal _height change is .05 pixels. Smaller increments are ignored:

trace(ball_mc._height);   // Displays: 100.
ball_mc._height += .01;
trace(ball_mc._height);   // Still displays 100. The assignment had no effect.

The _height of the main movie (either _root._height or _leveln._height) is not the Stage height as specified under Modify Movie Dimensions in the authoring tool, but rather the height of the contents of the main movie. As of Flash 6, the movie's specified dimensions are available via Stage.height and Stage.width.

For a loading movie, the _height property returns undefined until the movie has completely loaded.

Usage

Note that when we set the height of a movie clip, lines are scaled proportionally, losing their original point size as set in the Stroke panel. However, the point size of lines set to Hairline in the Stroke panel is not scaled when a movie clip is resized. Use hairlines to prevent your strokes from appearing fat or distorted when a clip is scaled.

Example

ball_mc._height = 20;     // Set the height of ball_mc to 20 pixels
ball_mc._height /= 2;     // Reduce the height of ball_mc by a factor of 2

See Also

MovieClip._width, MovieClip._yscale, Stage.height

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