Text Layout Framework released on Adobe Labs

22.11.08 Haykel Ben Jemia

Adobe released the first beta of the new Text Layout Framework (TLF) for Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. Built on the new text engine of Flash Player 10, the framework offers advanced typographic and text layout features. It supports bidirectional and vertical text, multi-column layout, text flow around inline images, advanced antialiasing and transformations (alpha, rotation, etc.) for device fonts and much more.

Flex Gumbo, the next release of Flex, already includes the framework and offers text components that use it. Flex 3.2 and ActionScript developers can download the framework and use it to develop their own text components and classes. For Flash CS4 Professional users, Adobe offers an extension to integrate the framework in their projects.

Comments (3)

Hi..I have an implemented project inTurkish made by flex 3 and now i want to convert whole frontend into Arabic. I am not sure to migrate to flex 4 since it has not an official release. I tried Flaraby but it does not fullfill my requirements. I need mirrored components, especially tree control. I was ready to pay for these if someone is selling these. Unfortunately, i found nothing on net except from TLF and Gumbo. If ı use gumbo, it is likely that i will have lots of problem since there are more thsn 50000 lines of code in my project. Does TLF work in rendering arabic texts right to left when the text come from a servlet?

Administrator's reply:

TLF renders Arabic text correctly no matter where it comes from as long as you feed it UTF-8 encoded text.

Regarding the mirrored components, it's planned for Gumbo but I think Adobe didn't yet start implementing this feature. So it wouldn't help to migrate to Gumbo for now.

I advise to use TLF for text and implement the component mirroring manually on a case by case basis. Especially for complex components like the tree control, you can see for example if you really need the folding functionality and if not, you could implement your own 'simple' mirrored tree.

This article could be helpful:
http://corlan.org/2009/01/19/how-to-use-text-layout-framework-in-flex-32-or-air-15/

If you need help, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.

Hyder, I personnally developed a whole application with Gumbo because I needed Arabic support and the TLF was not yet available. The application is working really good and is also stable, but I had a hard time developing it (I also had fun with the new Gumbo features and architecture :) ).

I had to deal with bugs, but most of them were resolved by the SDK team a few days after I submitted a bug report (that was really great, thanks to the Flax team).

The other problem was changes in the API, which can happen anytime (Gumbo is still alpha) and which breaks compilation of your code. But following the svn commits, you generally know exactly what changed and what you have to change in your code.

Regarding Arabic support, it works great. The text components make it really easy to use the TLF. The only difficulty for now, is that Gumbo does not yet support mirroring for the visual components (to make RTL interfaces), but with some hacking you can get it to work, especially that now you can easily develop your own layout components.

Hey, nice blog... just a quick question, how stable would you consider Gumbo to be at this point in time? I need to use Arabic in one of my applications. I'm not sure whether to go with implementing TLF or migrate to Flex 4

Hyder
www.alamgirdesigns.com