Styling text within Flex 3 TextArea using external CSS file

If you ever wondered how to use external style-sheets within a Flex 3 TextArea control to format text here's a nice solution.

example application
source

Embed your textfield styles in flex-applications css file

Application {
    fontFamily: embeddedFont;
    styleSheet: Embed(source="textFieldStyles.css", mimeType="application/octet-stream");
}

Create StyleSheet from style-definition and assign it and your data to the TextArea instance

private function applicationComplete():void {
    textArea.styleSheet = 
        StyleSheetUtil.forClassDefinition(getStyle("styleSheet"));
    textArea.htmlText = data;
}