Flash Player has a new text engine

Miguel Sousa · May 14, 2008

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

The Beta version of Adobe Flash Player 10 was just released on Adobe Labs. Among the many enhancements, there is a new Text Engine which comes along with an extensive library of ActionScript 3.0 Text Layout Components. Here's the blurb from the release notes.

New Text Engine
A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text layout and interactivity APIs to create component-level text objects. The new text engine expands creative freedom by treating device fonts as first class citizens that can be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled and have filters applied as if they were embedded. The new text engine also offers right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Text Layout Components
An extensible library of ActionScript 3.0 text components, coming in future to Adobe Labs, provides advanced, easy-to-integrate layout functionality that enables typographic creative expression. Layout and style text with tables, inline images, and column flow through components that are compatible with both Flash and Flex, all while getting the benefits of the new text engine. Rich text components allow designers and developers to flow text and complex scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, across multiple columns like a newspaper, around tables and inline images, from right-to-left, left-to-right, bi-directionally, or vertically. Selection, editing, and wrapping of text are handled as would be expected for the different layouts.

Anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1)
An update to the Saffron anti-aliasing text engine increases performance and quality of anti-aliased text, particularly for Asian character rendering. Support for stroke fonts reduces memory requirements.

That's right, support for Complex Scripts and OpenType features is coming to the Flash platform. These are great news!

Take a look at the video. It features Hypatia Sans Pro :^)

ebensorkin · May 15, 2008

Thanks Miguel! This sounds quite terrific!

So this engine clearly supports LIGA. But of course I must ask: What about CALT?

Miguel Sousa · May 15, 2008

I think support for Contextual alternates (calt) is there as well, along with a few other features (e.g. Discretionary ligatures, otherwise we wouldn't see Hypatia's 'st' ligature or the cap ligatures). But I need to ask around to get the full list. And surely Thomas will soon blog about it, providing a lot more details.

Thomas Phinney · May 15, 2008

Yes, I have a handy chart I made defining exactly what's there for OT features, but it will be a day or two before I post it.

Cheers,

T

ebensorkin · May 15, 2008

That sounds like very good news indeed!

Thanks Thomas!

Si_Daniels · May 15, 2008

What's the format for the stroke based fonts? Is it a public format or proprietary? As Saffron is owned by Monotype, is it the iType stroke based font format?

Joe Pemberton · May 19, 2008

Fantastic Miguel. Thanks for the update.

Si_Daniels · May 19, 2008

For those that are interested - more on Saffron...

http://www.merl.com/people/perry/SaffronWebPage/index.html

http://ir.monotypeimaging.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=299574

Cheers, Si

Mark Simonson · May 19, 2008

Great! I've been wishing for OT support in Flash ever since I started making OT fonts. It's been really frustrating having to tell customers using Flash that they can't have any of the type goodies. Is OT support coming for Fireworks? That would be nice, too.

Miguel Sousa · May 23, 2008

The API documentation for Astro (Flash Player 10's codename) has been recently made available. I had a look at the classes included in the flash.text.engine package, and there's some interesting stuff there,

DigitCase (DEFAULT, LINING, OLD_STYLE)
DigitWidth (DEFAULT, PROPORTIONAL, TABULAR)
Kerning (AUTO, OFF, ON)
LigatureLevel (COMMON, EXOTIC, MINIMUM, NONE, UNCOMMON)
TypographicCase (CAPS, CAPS_AND_SMALL_CAPS, DEFAULT, LOWERCASE, SMALL_CAPS, TITLE, UPPERCASE)

Some properties are easy to map to specific OpenType features, but not all. I also suspect that there's more OT support than these items make believe, since FP10 has complex script support after all. Some supported features are likely on by default under the hood.

The examples provided in the classes ElementFormat, TextBlock and TextLine are quite interesting as well.

Ricardo Cordoba · May 23, 2008

Yes! This is good news indeed! Thanks, Miguel!

Nick Shinn · May 23, 2008

Does this enable online type testers to have the functionality of the FontLab preview window?
If so, wow.

ebensorkin · May 23, 2008

Nick, that is a utterly great point.

Miguel Sousa · May 24, 2008

> Does this enable online type testers to have the functionality of the FontLab preview window?

Yes, I believe so. However, I don't think the API will allow you the level of granularity to turn on/off every single feature, like the FontLab Preview does. Remember, the API is supposed to give you access to the functionalities of the text engine, not to the functionalities of the font itself. You get to the font's functionalities indirectly through the text engine.

For those who can't wait to start developing content for FP10 Beta, Lee Brimelow has put together a videocast that explains it all very well: Flash Player 10 Beta: Getting Started - This tutorial shows you how to get started with creating content for Flash Player 10

And if you want to see something happening right on your browser, install the Beta from the labs, go to the Demos page, and click on the "New Text Engine" button. There you'll be able to interact with the 2-column text layout, and download the source code, like so,

k.l. · May 24, 2008

LigatureLevel (COMMON, EXOTIC, MINIMUM, NONE, UNCOMMON)

Nick, you may need to redesign fonts' feature logic to create exciting "exotic", "minimum", "uncommon" ligature behavior. :D
Unfortunately, the API documentation doesn't say which features are actually linked to which options.

Best wishes,
Karsten

tezzutezzu · May 24, 2008

Hello Miguel,
When will we be able to compile with these new features in Flash CS3 IDE? Is Adobe planning to make available a downloadable upgrade?

thanks

Miguel Sousa · May 24, 2008

> When will we be able to compile with these new features in Flash CS3 IDE? Is Adobe planning to make available a downloadable upgrade?

I don't know.

tezzutezzu · May 25, 2008

ok thanks.

Miguel Sousa · May 27, 2008

> Is OT support coming for Fireworks? That would be nice, too.

I don't know, but the Adobe Fireworks Beta was just posted on Adobe Labs and it claims to support the Adobe Type Engine (ATE). Here's the blurb from that page,

Adobe type engine
Produce superior type designs with the enhanced typesetting capabilities of Adobe Type Engine, familiar to users of Photoshop and Illustrator and now available in Fireworks. Import or copy and paste double-byte characters from Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop without loss of fidelity. Float text inside a path for high impact text logos.

and some more from the Release Notes page,

Adobe Text Engine — Many new enhancements have been integrated; such as retaining the fidelity of your Photoshop or Illustrator designs with text. Support for Ligatures and font style. Flowing text inside a closed path has been implemented.

Mark Simonson · May 27, 2008

Thanks, Miguel. That sounds hopeful.

Mark Simonson · May 29, 2008

Or, maybe not. I just downloaded the Fireworks CS4 Beta. The text tools appear virtually identical to those in the previous version. No obvious way to enable contextual alternates or any other OT feature. Maybe is only works when you paste something in from Illustrator or whatever... Hmm. Paste a text block in from Illustrator, and suddenly the contextual alternates are working, even when I change to a different font. Make a new text block, and it's back to pre-OT text handling. Kind of lame, but better than no support at all, I guess.

Thomas Phinney · June 5, 2008

Yes, the Fireworks feature is solely for text brought in from Illustrator. You can, however, edit that text to your heart's content (including changing font, size, etc.), so one can imagine making what is essentially a style sheet of pasted Illustrator text blocks for use in Fireworks, implementing different features.

Note that the ligature support is off in the public beta. It wasn't working quite right, so they turned it off rather than let you enjoy a nasty bug. One might reasonably guess it will be back in the final version, though of course I can make no promises.

Cheers,

T

Thomas Phinney · June 5, 2008

Also, I finally got up my blog post on Flash Player, which covers language support as well as typographic OpenType functionality (the latter towards the bottom of the post).

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2008/06/flash_player_10.html#more

k.l. · June 5, 2008

Thanks!

Mark Simonson · June 5, 2008

Is it possible that any of those missing features (Stylistic Sets, Swashes, Fractions, etc.) will make it in before release?

Flash Player has a new text engine

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