Friday, March 20, 2009

Arabic Text as a Flex Button label?

The Text Layout Framework that Adobe has made available on the labs site is a very cool display of the capabilities of Flash Player. However, what seems to be suspiciously missing from all the demos is an example of how to use Arabic text on a button. Just putting arabic in the MXML as the button label obviously doesn't work (otherwise... I wouldn't be posting this). What happens is the letters look like they are in reverse order. I can't read Arabic, but I don't think that would make much sense. Especially since none of the letters get connected with the appropriate ligatures.

Looking at the source code for the examples doesn't shed any light on the problem. If you have seen this done please comment with an example.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Let me check on this for you. I've been meaning to spend some time with the Text Layout Framework.

Unknown said...

What version of Flex are you using? Only Flex 4 supports the new text engine.

Rob McKeown said...

Yeah. I can see it working correctly with a Gumbo FxButton, but not with a regular Halo Button. I guess my question is more than just about buttons. I am working on on very big app for a very big client who needs support for Arabic text. I am wondering if it is even possible at all with Flex 3.

Ryan, I would love to talk to you, or anyone at Adobe, about the feasibilty of it.

Unknown said...

You might want to check out this page:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo+Font+Embedding

Looks like they are planning to make it possible to use the new text engine with Flex 3.

Derek