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D
Daniel Freeman
Inspiring
December 3, 2009
Question

First beta prototype of e2publish

  • December 3, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 711 views

e2publish is a sophisticated AIR application that uses the Text Layout Framework.  I've just made the first beta prototype available of my website.

http://www.e2easy.co.cc/e2publish.html

An ambitious project such as this relies on the feedback of test users.  Comments, suggestions, recommendations, ideas, and bug reports.  Let me know what you think?

A video presentation about this project can be found here:-

http://e2easy.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/announcing-an-adobe-air-publish-application/

The most novel feature is way the text arranges itself to warp around the pictures, wherever they are placed on the page.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

R
Adobe Employee
rdermer
Adobe Employee
December 4, 2009

Very nice.  Congratulations!

I loaded alice.xml into one of our test apps cut and pasted it into your app - couldn't find a way to import TLF markup from a file.  That worked nicely and created a 31 page document.  I paged around and used the import button to bring some images in - all worked well.

Guess I should watch the video to learn more.

Richard

D
Daniel FreemanAuthor
Inspiring
December 4, 2009

I guess I should add importing TLF markup to the list of intended future features.

And .rtf file import and export which probably more useful for most users.

Did you use a PC?  I didn't have a windows PC to test this on.  I'd just like someone to confirm that everything behaves ok.

R
Adobe Employee
rdermer
Adobe Employee
December 5, 2009

I am using WinXP.

RTF would be very useful.  We've talked about allowing for pluggable TextConverters so that clients can add them and read/write more formats via the clipboard.  That's not in this release though.

Just some thoughts that occured to me as I used the application.

I'm not a UI expert - probably can tell that - the UI has some nice starter ideas.  Seems like the advantage of Flash is that there is the opportunity to create interesting and fun UI - there's some of that happening here which is great.

I was using the UI to reshape the pages.  I'm not sure how useful that is - generally I'd think people want a template that applies to all pages. Still the UI is fun.  I wanted to draw more boxes and connect them with arrows.

Is the undo stack integrated?  The UndoManager is designed with the hope that other clients can use it and stack their own operations.  Seems like I was undoing operations to reshape the page as well as operations to the flow but I wasn't sure.  It'd be nice if the ctrl-z and ctrl-y keys worked everywhere and not just over the TLF area.

The scrollbar doesn't indicate there are more pages or provide a way to switch pages - that's annoying.  I keep trying to scroll backwards to previous pages with the scroll wheel on the mouse as well.  I found the page icons in the top left.

Not sure if your goal is to demonstrate knowledge of TLF and Flash - (you've clearly got that) - or to make some sort of word processor (long way to go).

I still didn't watch the video.

Hope that's of interest

Richard

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