hierarchy help

I made a dynamic text balloon like you see in comics by having an autosizing textfield and a circle mc behind it which scales to the textfield width and height. The text field and circle mc are both seperate objects, so I move and scale them individually.

A better solution would be to make the textfield a child of the balloon mc. The problem with that is that when I scale the balloon mc to encompass the textfield I also scale the textfield (because it is now a child).

I tried making the balloon mc a child of the textfield instead, but somehow the balloon didn't show and I couldn't manage to make it work. Meaby a textfield has some restricitions I'm not aware of?


What would be the best hierarchy structure for something like this?
And is it possible for a textfield to have a mc as a child?

Why not just have them both in a movieClip? I think that makes sense here, not sure if I get exactly what you're doing.

I have an exampe swf online here (http://kirl.nl/textWriteBubble1.swf). I haven't embedded the font yet though, so text might look weird. Apparantly it's not entirely straightforward to embed fonts for a generated textfield...

I noticed some anti-aliasing issues when I put the textfield inside another MC though. I know I should embed fonts if I want anti-aliasing, but I guess this is not related. Because on the root layer the text is smooth, but when I put the textfield in an empty movieclip the anti-aliasing dissappears?


A lot of experimenting brings me to the following questions though:

Is an empty MC the same as a layer, what's the practical difference?
And is an empty MC a good container format, what about an Object?