Creating a sprite with BitmapText?

[matt_g]

I want to animate some bitmap font text and I thought maybe I could make a sprite out of it and use tweening functions on it, but I can't figure out how to get BitmapText into a Sprite texture.

 

I thought maybe I could write the BitmapText into a BitmapData object and then use that to create the sprite texture, but I don't see any way to render BitmapText other than into the game itself.

 

Can anyone help?  I'm not sure what the right approach is.