Flex 4 and New Text Engine

Flash player’s support for left to right text has been limited ever since the beginning. But Flash player 10′s new Text Engine is going to change all that. Flash Text Engine (FTE)  is the set of new classes that are part of Flash Player 10 which supports low-level text functionality. The Flash Text Engine has support for bi-directional text, which means the text can now flow from left-to-right and right-to-left as well as vertically. Applications can now be localized in the real sense and can support languages like Hebrew, Chinese, Arabic. Moreover, device fonts will now get their due respect and will be treated at par with embedded fonts. We can now stylize, antialias, apply all effects and filters to device fonts as we could with embedded fonts.

FTE will be the foundation for all future text functionality in the player and the TextField, though maintained for backward compatibility, will no longer be enhanced nor bug fixed.

Developers will be able to access the engine through the low level APIs made available in Flex and Flash. Adobe says that  very few developers will need to use FTE API. What comes out of those who use it would certainly be interesting to see then. Flex 4 will also provide a new set of Text Layout components that will make text and layout handling easy and also enable integration of typographic elements. Yes, the new Text engine also supports typographic elements like ligatures. Text could now contain tables, inline images and column flow and these would be made available through components. Text can now also flow into multiple columns around tables and images like in newspapers from left-to-right, right-to-left, bi-directionally, and vertically.

Also, unlike TextField, the new Text Engine follows a new text object model where in the styles, paragraphs, spans are not represented as formats that were part of the single text string, but rather as individual Actionscript objects with their own properties, methods and events. This means, we can now access each paragraph or each span separately at runtime for formatting purposes and the text that is displayed is actually distributed across the leaf nodes of this text object model.

With this whole bunch of improvements to text rendering, Adobe has certainly made a lot of their users happy who were waiting for this for quite a long time. The only thing that seems to be still pending is full HTML support. So far, even this new Text engine doesn’t seem to support full HTML. But if the API provided is really that low level as Adobe says, someone might try to put together their own HTML Text component.