A colleague of mine sent me a link to Adobe Labs where Adobe is showcasing the beta release of the Text Layout Framework for Adobe® Flash® Player 10 and Adobe AIR® 1.5. The star of the show? Its multilingual capabilities.
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.
- 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.
Of course, it’s a bonus that they’re using a gorgeous language selector (which wouldn’t be practical for all sites, to be sure) to showcase it. (And to put icing on the cake, the source code is available for download from within the demo.)
I have some ideas for this in mind already and will keep you posted when I have something to show.
