Richard Leggett on New Media

I’ve been using the TLF for the last day, and it’s really a major leap forward from the limitations of the TextField class introduced in Flash 6. TextField still has its uses, it’s most likely more processor friendly (unconfirmed). But if you’re in need of some of TLF’s advanced features like bi-di text (or complex script like TCY elements), support for flowing text between multiple columns and containers, better handling of in-line images, advanced styling of things like ligatures, superscript, and tracking, then TLF is for you.

The key thing for me was understanding how these key concepts fit together:

Follow up:

TextFlow - the root of all things TLF, this is what heads up your story/document

Container - your DisplayObject that will contain the visual TextLines (physically displays text on the display list).

Elements - e.g. TextFlow, DivElement, ParagraphElement, these represent the “model” classes that hierarichally describe your TextFlow.

FlowManager/ContainerControllers - together these bridge the data to the container in order to perform the on screen layout.

There’s also a package for editors which allow editing of a TextFlow with undo/redo, and utility classes for importing/export text to XML, and quickly getting a bunch of TextLines from a string or a TextFlow without going through the flow layout engine.

Adobe has just posted a gentle introduction to TLF on the developer connection site. It appears to be a more pleasant version of their introductory PDFs (which I still recommend reading after).

Read the article here.

Introductory PDF mentioned here.

LiveDocs API here.

There are still some things missing, like support for bullet points, although I imagine these will come in future, for now you can use an in-line image and a TabElement.