Two more open source projects from Adobe

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 22 July 2009 04:39

Business IT - Open Source

TLF provides advanced typographical facilities for web applications. Designed for use with Flex or Flash Professional, it includes such features as kerning, ligatures, discretionary hyphens, multiple columns and linked containers.

Support is provided for more than 30 scripts, including those with bidirectional and vertical text (eg Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Thai). It provides the usual cut/copy/paste/undo functions via keyboard or mouse.

"Adobe is committed to providing core Flash Platform technologies to the community as open source," said Dave McAllister, director of standards and open source at Adobe.

"By releasing OSMF and TLF as open source, we are helping facilitate the creation and sharing of best practices for media players and rich text-based Web application development. We believe these efforts will strengthen the industry and lead to the next generation of Web applications, content and video experiences," he added.

TLF is already used by the makebook online publishing system to provide multi-column text flows, wrapping text around images, and other layout options.

"APIs that are standard in the open source Text Layout Framework from Adobe gave us a jumpstart as we leveraged the high-end components for makebook.com," said Mark Stanley, founder of makebook.

"With TLF we can more easily provide our customers with quality typography features and the text layout control they require for their self-publishing projects," he added.