Known Participant

Question

how 'usefull' will TLF be for Flash AS3 projects?

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
February 9, 2010
3 replies
3613 views

The size that TLF will add to a flash project is really huge while it's missing some really standard (HTML) features like floating images and tables. So if those feauters will eventually be added (in v2?) the size will even increase more.

A simple (non editable) output of "Hello World" takes 229KB and with edit capabilities 332kB

Even if the framework ends up in the player cache then it has to be downloaded once (and everytime it's updated).

If one needs to extend the TLF classes I guess you loose the benefit of the player cache completely (right?).

What is your take on the size of the TLF, will it be a potential problem?

Is it even an option for mobile (player 10.1) use?

I would love to hear your thoughts about this.

Text layout framework

This topic has been closed for replies.

Y

Yoshiki_Okawa

Participating Frequently

Yes, it is annoying that some classes has huge unused methods or properties in my project. Like, in TextLayoutFormat.as, I can safely exclude method concatInheritOnly. saved 500bytes

If I can see which methods/properties of which classes are not used, then I can exclude the unused parts.

Just curiousity, does anyone know a way to do that?

R

rdermer

Adobe Employee

Oh I think that the concatInheritOnly function gets used now and again - its part of the cascade.

Actually that one is interesting. The tradeoff is that by expanding it we get faster performance. We could do the same code with dictionary style lookups and much less code. So in that case we traded code size for performance.

I'm tempted to ask which is better - faster speed or smaller code size - but the answer is both. So I won't ask.

In any case code size is something we're quite concerened with.

One way to exclude code - TLF is opensource so if you want to cut away parts you aren't using go ahead and download the source and whack away. You'll have to build it yourself.

Hope that helps,

Richard

B

bvlAuthor

Known Participant

I am surprised that other TLF users/investigaters (outside the TLF dev team) don't comment on the size issue. I am really curious about their take on this, so please if you have aminute ...

Maybe I am making a too big an issue out of this?

A

Anonymous

Text handling is one of the most important things for web pages, applications, etc.

Why would you attempt to build a less than optimal AS3 TFL solution which is based on a less than optimal FTE ?

Seems like a more efficient TLF C++ solution that is an integral part of flash would have been a better choice.

B

bvlAuthor

Known Participant

My problem is with the size of the initial download. Besides that I love what the FTE/TLF brings to the table.

Lately there is a lot of disucussion about Flash. People that dislike Flash often mention that it takes a long time for a lot of Fash sites before the acutal content is shown. This is due to (pre)loading ofcourse. My worry is that TLF will worsening that experience due to the extra (initial) download.

Maybe if the TLF would be distributed with every Player then the dillema would be far less.

G

GordonSmith

Participating Frequently

The TLF 1.0 SWZ file is a one-time-per-version download of 152 KB.

You can extend TLF classes that are in the SWZ.

Floating images and tables are on the TLF roadmap for future versions but no dates have been announced.

A mobile version is under consideration; TLF 1.0 was not designed for use on mobile devices.

Gordon Smith

Adobe Flex SDK Team

T

tcreader

Participant

We have a service with over 6 million registered users, and we are watching the ongoing HTML5 vs Flash debate attentively, as we try to choose which technology to move forward with. We are invested into Flash, since our legacy code is ActionScript 1.0/2.0. We have been looking forward to the new features of TLF, but the fact that it lacks many elements present in HTML 2.0 (let alone HTML 5) is not going to help the Flash vs HTML 5 outcome.

A

Anonymous

We definitely do need to support more HTML features, and we have plans to get to them. On the other hand, the level of typographic expressivity and layout features in TLF are in some ways far beyond what you get in HTML (or today's HTML5, or even future plans for HTML5).

So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. While we are missing tables, lists and floats at the moment, some people have added those features in themselves in ActionScript. TLF features that HTML text handling lacks are much harder (or impossible) to remedy.

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