Text Trickery

If you've ever worked with text extensively you know that it presents some deceptively complex problems. Specifically, things like getting really good looking, print quality text on screen or translating screen text to high quality print are much more complicated than they might appear at first glance.

Dealing with text is a fairly common task so it seems like it’s probably a worth while cause to make this task simpler. Adobe has a new text layout framework available that goes a long way in doing exactly that. The framework leverages the capabilities of the new text engine in Flash 10/AIR 1.5, which boasts some pretty powerful features for handling some notorious text issues. There are some great layout features like vertical text, multi-column text, linked text fields and inline graphics. It also provides some fine-grained control over text display with support for things like kerning and ligatures. There's a video tour of the framework on Adobe's site and Mihai Corlan has posted a good article on getting started.

The API is very new and changing at a rapid pace so I wouldn't dive in if you don't like it when the online docs don't always match the API. However, if you don't mind a few headaches and doing some digging it's some pretty interesting technology.