Text Layout Framework Technology Center

The Text Layout Framework is an extensible Adobe ActionScript library built on the new text engine introduced in Adobe Flash Player 10 that 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 and later or Adobe Flex and is already included in Flex 4 and later. Developers can use or extend existing components or use the framework to create their own text components.

The Text Layout Framework is available as open-source software.

See a demo of the Text Layout Framework here.

The Text Layout Framework and the new text engine in Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 bring some amazing new capabilities to the Adobe Flash Platform, including:

• Bidirectional text, vertical text, and over 30 writing scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and others
• Selection, editing, and flowing text across multiple columns and linked containers
• 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, and markup and to create custom text components
• ActionScript-based, object-oriented model for rich text layout that can be changed at runtime