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Want to layout your text better? You can download the beta Text Layout Framework / component (use with Flash CS4 now)

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Last Updated on November 21, 2008

Today the Text Layout Framework went live for Flash Player 10. This will help you layout your text in new and much better ways in your applications. You may have seen some demos at MAX (like the Herald Tribune demo) where the text flow, direction, etc was handled way better – now the functionality is on LABS. Check it out here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/

Note that you can download FLA examples from the presentation at the top of the page, to help you understand how to use the component.

To quote the page,

“The Text Layout Framework is an extensible library, built on the new text engine in Adobe® Flash® Player 10, which delivers advanced, easy-to-integrate typographic and text layout features for rich, sophisticated and innovative typography on the web. The framework is designed to be used with Adobe Flash CS4 Professional or Adobe Flex®, and is already included in the next version of Flex, code named Gumbo. Developers can use or extend existing components, or use the framework to create their own text components.”

You can download and install the component in Flash CS4, try it out for yourself.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/textlayout.html

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Comments

  1. Hi Jen

    Can you later post a little tutorial about framework and how it can be used with bidirectional languages?

  2. There are multiple ways to use TextLayout.
    1) There is a Flash component that allows you to design text with a User Interface, just like you would with Flash using the Text Tool — note that the User Interface for TextLayout is in a separate window.
    2) You can use Flex Builder or Eclipse to write .mxml applications and ActionScript.
    3) You can use Flash and sub-class the Flash Component in ActionScript to add additional features or override existing functionality.

    Have some fun with it and give us some feedback!

  5. Hmm, not bad but there’s one problem – it doesn’t let you select a font style. I wanted to layout some type using Gill Sans Std Bold, but I could only select Gill Sans Std. My only alternative was to use one of the faux-styles, but they don’t look pretty. It’s strange since the font styles are all selectable using the regular Flash type tools…