Typophile - Flash Player has a new text engine - Comments

Thanks Miguel... I see that

DonMoir — Mon, 9 Jun 2008 07:33:12 -0700

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.

> I don’t see a way to

Miguel Sousa — Fri, 6 Jun 2008 10:34:15 -0700

> 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.

Mark: Not likely, but feel

Thomas Phinney — Fri, 6 Jun 2008 10:03:41 -0700

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,

I don’t see a way to make

DonMoir — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 14:10:37 -0700

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.

Is it possible that any of

Mark Simonson — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 11:22:18 -0700

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

Thanks!

k.l. — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 11:17:35 -0700

Thanks!

Also, I finally got up my

Thomas Phinney — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 11:07:34 -0700

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

Yes, the Fireworks feature

Thomas Phinney — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 11:05:15 -0700

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,

Or, maybe not. I just

Mark Simonson — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:32:04 -0700

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.

Thanks, Miguel. That sounds

Mark Simonson — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:53:19 -0700

Thanks, Miguel. That sounds hopeful.

> Is OT support coming for

Miguel Sousa — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:49:56 -0700

> 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.

ok thanks.

tezzutezzu — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:15:23 -0700

ok thanks.

> When will we be able to

Miguel Sousa — Sat, 24 May 2008 10:39:21 -0700

> 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.

Hello Miguel, When will we

tezzutezzu — Sat, 24 May 2008 03:55:59 -0700

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

LigatureLevel (COMMON,

k.l. — Sat, 24 May 2008 03:23:09 -0700

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

Flash Player has a new text engine

Miguel Sousa — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:22:05 -0700

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 :^)