Flash Player has a new text engine

[DonMoir]

I don't see a way to make text.engine text selectable. Miguel, have you checked this ? This would be important in doing page layout and possibly an editor using text.engine. I have spent little time on text.engine so far, so I am not sure if using it for an editor is even practical.

[Thomas Phinney]

Mark: Not likely, but feel free to use the feature reqest form to let the Flash Player team know what you want. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Regards,

T

[Miguel Sousa]

> I don’t see a way to make text.engine text selectable. Miguel, have you checked this ?

No, I haven't. The flash.text.engine classes on the Flash Player 10 Beta are essentially low-level classes. Think of them as the building blocks. If so inclined, you can build a text editor on top of them, but I agree it's not a trivial task. You might want to wait for FP10's final release, which will likely have a more comprehensive framework.

[DonMoir]

Thanks Miguel... I see that in the adobe labs demo for the text engine, ( http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/index.html ) the text is selectable and I assume this is provided by the programmer, but there is no ibeam cursor. Hopefully they will provide the tools or whatever to do this in an 'efficient' way. In flash 9, I already front end the textfield to fix a couple problems as can be seen here: http://sms.pangolin.com/vflash/Venus.html. Note that the text.engine sample provided by adobe is XML and does not contain complete source.

[Miguel Sousa]

Peter deHaan has been posting some Flex Examples on his blog. Check out how to,
-- Embed fonts in Flex Gumbo
-- Set the typographic case
-- Set the ligature level

[Miguel Sousa]

In terms of OpenType feature tags, the ligature levels correspond to,

minimum = rlig
common = liga, clig
uncommon = dlig
exotic = hlig

[hrant]

Does it still support pixelfonts, especially grayscale ones?

hhp

[Miguel Sousa]

The promised Text Layout Framework has been released today on Adobe Labs at,
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/

The diagram below shows the relationship between the Text Engine and the Framework and Components released today.

[Miguel Sousa]

> Does it still support pixelfonts, especially grayscale ones?

If by "support" you mean that the fonts are displayed the same way as before, I think it does, but I haven't tried.

[hrant]

Great!

Is there a meaning of "support" where the answer is "No"? :-/

hhp

[Miguel Sousa]

I think DefineFont4 only supports OpenType and TrueType fonts.

[Miguel Sousa]

The Max session entitled "Using the Component Library for Flash Player" by Robin Briggs has just been made available on Adobe TV at http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f15383v1000

[Thomas Phinney]

TLF only works with DefineFont 4.

DefineFont 4 only uses CFF outlines internally, but TrueType fonts can be converted as part of authoring the SWF or AIR app.

More on this and the rendering of such fonts in my final Adobe blog post here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2008/12/tlf_rasterization.html

Cheers,

T

[hrant]

Wow, you're leaving Adobe?! That's a bummer. Who will fill
your shoes there? And most of all: what are you moving on to?

hhp

[Thomas Phinney]

The answer to both questions is "I don't know." Although I have been working with my (former) colleagues to hand off my more pressing tasks.

T

[Miguel Sousa]

Here's a great article by Mihai Corlan on Using the Text Layout Framework in Flex 3.2 and AIR 1.5.

[jessica winslet]

This is really a good article, and I have to say that FP10 looks and sounds fantastic. I'm really looking forward to the new (inevitable) Flash/Flex updates so I can get stuck into the FP10 features. The new text jeux de casino related stuff, 3D API, local file loading/saving, and hardware accelerated bitmap rendering are going to make a huge difference to Flash based websites.

[dberlowgone]

"...use the feature request form to let the Flash Player team know what you want."

Just one; I want Flash to do everything InDesign does. They've already agreed, so I can only wait. :)

Congratulations Adobe, for moving.

Cheers!