Like many of you I'm sure, I've struggled with text in Flash/Flex more than once. For the most part, I've learned to get it to do what I want, but, there's still some things missing, especially when it comes to allowing users to manipulate text, an easy way to integrate robust HTML text for formatting, that sort of thing.
I haven't played around with it enough to write anything useful, but this looks very promising:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/
The gist is, the text framework is getting a complete overhaul; we'll have it Gumbo, and it's already in CS4, all targeted at Player 10 (which is a significant evolution, what with the ability to save files locally and such as well).
Summary of highlighted features, this is interesting stuff:
- 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.
Interesting stuff.
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