Text Layout Framework for AIR 1.5 and Flash Player 10

I remember my first FlexCamp, back in 2007. In one of the breaks I was asked this question: “When will we get support for languages from right to left?”. Now I have an answer to this question :). Because Text Layout Framework, which was released on http://labs.adobe.com can handle this type of usage.

Just visit this link and play with the demo a little bit (the source code of the demo is available too). I think you will like it as much as I do.

The Text Layout Framework can do more than handling right-to-left languages. Here is an excerpt from the labs page:

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.

You can use this framework with Flex 3.2, Flex Gumbo (the next version of Flex), and with Flash CS4. I plan to try it myself in a Flex project (3.2), and I will write a post about it.

In the meantime, I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.