I have the following code to create and apply a few styles for a custom TextArea in ActionScript 3.

public class MyCustomTextArea extends TextArea
{
  override protected function createChildren():void
  {
    super.createChildren();
    this.styleSheet.setStyle("sup", { display: "inline", fontFamily: "ArialSup", fontSize:"12"});
    this.styleSheet.setStyle("sub", { display: "inline", fontFamily: "ArialSub", fontSize:"12"});
    this.setStyle("fontFamily", "Arial");  
  }
}

I have two problems with this code.

this.styleSheet is always null when I create an instance of the class. If this.styleSheet is initialized to new StyleSheet() to avoid this issue, then the TextArea instance does not seem to recognize any of the HTML tags that can be used with the htmlText property.

Can anyone help in fixing these two issues? Thanks.