Posts Tagged ‘text’

Advanced Text Layout Framework for Flash Open-Sourced (Adobe)

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

advancedflashtextengine1

[Editor’s note: Finally, Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia is bearing fruit! The fine-control that Illustrator and InDesign have over typography (text layout) is now available in Flash and Flex as an ActionScript 3.0 framework. There are even a few controls I wish would make it back to Illustrator, like where in the text container the text starts from (not always the top-left hand corner) and allowing images and graphics to be embedded in the text frame, ala Freehand. Also note the Photoshop style numerical control scrubbers!]

Republished from Adobe Labs.

Welcome to the beta release of the Text Layout Framework for Adobe® Flash® Player 10 and Adobe AIR® 1.5. 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. Source code and component library for TLF are now available as open source at no charge under the Mozilla Public License at www.opensource.adobe.com.

Together with the new text engine in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5, the Text Layout Framework delivers multi-lingual, print-quality typography for the web, including support for:

  • Bidirectional text, vertical text and over 30 writing systems including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, the major writing systems of India, and others
  • Selection, editing and flowing text across multiple columns and linked containers, and around inline images
  • Vertical text, Tate-Chu-Yoko (horizontal within vertical text) and justifier for East Asian typography
  • Rich typographical controls, including kerning, ligatures, typographic case, digit case, digit width and discretionary hyphens
  • Cut, copy, paste, undo and standard keyboard and mouse gestures for editing
  • Rich developer APIs to manipulate text content, layout, markup and create custom text components.

For a complete list of features and more information regarding this beta, please see the release notes. Please help us ensure that the final release of the Text Layout Framework will be of the highest quality by installing and using this beta version and sending us your feedback on the Text Layout Framework forum.

Open Source

The Text Layout Framework is now an open source project.

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Posted in Best practices, Data source, Flash, Interactive, Promote, Software | Comments Off on Advanced Text Layout Framework for Flash Open-Sourced (Adobe)

Announcing Merge Text Extension for Adobe Illustrator (Ajar Productions)

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

[Editor’s note: Dealing with broken text (common in PDF files) can be dastardly. There are a couple existing scripts out there, but few combine and preserve the font styling information at the same time. This new script does that with options. I’m curious how this new script from Ajar Productions installs into Illustrator using the Adobe Extension Manager, usually just for the old Macromedia products but not in all CS4 apps? The Flash version is also appealing.]

Republished from Ajar Productions. First seen at Mordy’s Real World Illustrator blog.

Following the release of [Ajar’s] Combine Textfields extension for Flash, [they] put together a similar extension for Adobe Illustrator. This extension installs a script that will merge text (including text on a path) into one text object, while retaining the style attributes of the individual pieces, including character styles as well as paragraph styles (if the separator includes a return character).

Anyone who’s tried to edit text from a PDF opened in Illustrator knows how frustrating it can be to make simple text edits when the text is broken up. This extension reduces that headache.

Special thanks to David Van Brink for posting the Omino Dialog Maker. His time-saving code was used to produce the dialog box in this extension.

Download Options

Installation Instructions

JSX or JS file:

  1. Place the MergeText_AI.jsx (or MergeText_AI_CS.js) into the Scripts directory within your Illustrator application directory:

Windows > C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator {version}\Presets\en_US\Scripts
Mac OS X > Applications/Adobe Illustrator {version}/Presets/Scripts

Note: In CS4, the directory path will include a region directory (e.g. Adobe Illustrator CS4/Presets/en_US/Scripts).

MXP file (CS4 only):

  1. Double-click on the mxp file to install using Adobe Extension Manager.

Usage

In Adobe Illustrator, select the text the you want to merge together and go to File > Scripts > MergeText_AI. If you’re using Illustrator CS3 or CS4, you will be prompted with a dialog box where you can choose your sorting orientation and a custom separator. If you’re using a version earlier than CS3, you will not be prompted with a dialog; the script will run using the default settings sorting topmost, then leftmost, with a separator of “[><]“. You can then run a Find and Replace and replace the separator with the characters of your choice.

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Posted in Best practices, General, Promote, scripting, Software | 6 Comments »