How to use TextFormat on multiple frames

Question

I must be missing something, but how on earth do I make it so
that I can set TextFormats for the whole movie and not just the
frame the actionscript is on.
My movie is basically a video with cuepoints that trigger
different keyframes that display text appropriate to what the
person featured in the video is talking about. In other words it's
like a powerpoint presentation that's run by an FLV file. Almost
all of the blocks of text I'll be displaying are bulleted lists and
since, for some odd reason, bulleted lists aren't available using
the standard Flash GUI text formating tools I need to apply them
via ActionScript. All the ActionScript is in its own keyframe at
the beginning of the movie timeline. I've setup my text formating
code like this:
var bulletlist:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
bulletlist.bullet = true;
bulletlist_field.setTextFormat(bulletlist);
While I have successfully applied this to a box of text on
the first frame of the movie, I haven't be able to apply it to text
on any other keyframe. So from what I can tell, I have to reference
the above TextFormat actionscript for every frame I need to use it
on, and since I can't have duplicate TextFormat values, that means
I'd have to create a new instance with a new name for each frame.
This seems rather inefficient and frankly ridiculous consider that
the other ActionScript that I wrote seems to apply to the whole
movie. And what's the point of using ActionScript to format text if
you have to redo it for every *******' keyframe? Is there some
function that I'm missing somewhere to allow me to use one set of
TextFormat code on multiple frames or is this simply a dysfunction
of Flash and/or ActionScript 3.
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Craig Grummitt - Why so it is. Thanks for pointing that out.
But my point still remains: You can change the defaultTextFormat
property before you assign the text property or you can use
setTextFormat() after you have assigned the text property. That one
is a property and the other is a method just makes it more likely
that somebody will over look one or the other!
fallenturtle - part of the issue is that really great
typographic stuff is tough and most people can't even use the
simple tools that we have. For use with CS4 and Flash 10 publishing
they are coming out with a far more complex Text Layout Framework.
As best I can tell it is insanely complex and I'm guessing most
people will never use it....but who knows.
Additionally you are trying to do one of the more difficult
things: mix timeline with code. That always gets tricky. If you
were just using code you could create one textformat instance and
apply it to all your code-created text fields. But since each
timeline created clip is a new one you will need to apply the
formatting by hand.
Or you could just have one timeline created text field that
went across all your frames and then change its properties with
code everytime you needed to change it.