RightToLeft and TopToBottom example for textfield or textarea

MacShrike

Ls, and/or Very Dear Josh ( 😄 yes I want something),

My xml editor is working. If you would see my feathers code you would probably cry, but; no one is ever going to see it, it works better than doing it by hand, and I'm running out of time.

Would you be so kind to show me a small example of how to implement the RTL for Arab and RTL and TTB for asian text display.
I'm using a simple startling textfield, but a feathers textarea would do the same I recon.
I have some flash scenes that I load that contain textfields a placement markers that I replace in code with startling (or feathers ) textfields.
In them are simple texts of a few lines at most.
Since I can now create all the texts I want and translate them. Creating a few specific Arab and Asian templates is doable and, I think, splendid and worthwhile.

If you could show me how easy it is to apply the required styles or settings, that would save me invaluable time.
Or you can say RTFM and I'm okay with that afcourse.
I am already doing that however and apparently my brain don't think too good.
As It appears I am not that fast a learner anymore.

Regards,
Mac

joshtynjala

RTL never really worked well in flash.display.TextField. It's not completely unsupported, but I've heard that it could be described as "very poor" at best. I don't think TTB was supported by TextField at all.

At some point, Adobe introduced Flash Text Engine (FTE), a more advanced text rendering system for Flash/AIR. It's definitely way better than TextField for RTL and TTB. However, I don't have a lot of guidance for you about how to use it because I've never had to support RTL or TTB in any real-world apps that I've built.

To use FTE in Feathers, you can use TextBlockTextRenderer and TextBlockTextEditor. They should expose most of the properties available on FTE's TextBlock class.

You should also check out Using Flash Text Engine in the official docs for more details.

(Note: I don't think I ever got FTE working in the TextArea component — only non-editable components like Label and Button, along with the single line editable TextInput... and single line TextInput with TextBlockTextEditor doesn't work well on mobile)

MacShrike

Hah, ok thanks for the heads up.
In that case I will have to mcGuyver it. At least it will look like the rest of my code =))

BBartonW

@MacShrike I've done Arabic ~~left to right~~--OOOPS I meant right to left-- in Flash Classic Text fields.

Sorry for late reply--I haven't done much coding lately and haven't been in the forums. I presume you have already figured it out, but if not, let me know.

I just opened the FLA file (haven't done that in years) and took a quick look at it. It involves Arial font, htmlText, CSS, XML, and Excel for receiving Arabic text. I remember something about having to make my Windows computer handle Arabic for the production side of things.

I first did it in 2009, and then again in 2019 for updates for kiosks in Doha, Qatar. The process wasn't pretty, but I could probably figure it out again.

I've never used Starling (or even Feathers yet). I have not tried Arabic in OpenFL.

Let me know if I can try to help.

Cheers!