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C
cdfohsmi
Participant
February 14, 2011
Question

PDF/PrintJob issue - difference b/w Classic and TLF/FTE

  • February 14, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 636 views

Hi - I'm hoping some Adobe insiders can share some insight on this.

I'm basically trying to take the final output (page Sprite) rendered from TLF or the Flash Text Engine, and convert it to PDF with selectable vector text.

I get decent results from using PrintJob and a pdf driver like pdfcreator or cutepdf (both use ghostscript on my machine). However, the text in the pdf isn't selectable.

This is different when using "classic" Flash9 textfield components.... any text that gets converted is usually selectable. The PDF properties also show (for textfield) that the appropriate font was embedded. Not the case for Tlf TextLines.

I'm wondering:

- Is this a bug? Or an interntional design choice (if so, what's the reasoning?)

- How can I get a PDF made that uses vector fonts and selectable text from FTE output (Sprites)? Ideally I'd want the pdf conversion without the need to use a print driver... so is there any other solution other than printjob - an external library or some server-based loop that can get this done? I want to make the sprites first (and not e.g. directly use PDF's API) because of the layout requirements... Flash FTE / TLF works great for that for us.

Any help on this would be super! So thanks in advnace,

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

R
Adobe Employee
robin_briggs
Adobe Employee
February 14, 2011

I don't know much about either pdfcreator or cutepdf, so it's hard for me to say. My guess is that both of these are looking at the Flash display objects, which are TextLine for FTE and TextField for classic text. A TextLine is just the information necessary for display, it doesn't have any concept of selection or editing. That's all in the ActionScript code. A TextField, on the other hand, does know whether it is static, selectable or editable. I suspect that's the core of the difficultly.

I did find this forum posting that might be helpful:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2602888#2602888

C
cdfohsmiAuthor
Participant
February 15, 2011

Hi Robin,

Thanks so much for the response.

That indeed sounds like precisely the issue.

Is there no way to add that extra info about selectability to TextLine (or

is there some reference of which properties or fields are maintained by

TextField for this info and that could be used to make an extended TextLine

object with those extra bits?

Or what about trying to replace all TextLines with TextFields just before

printing (by reading their rawtext etc) - the part of that I'm uncertain of

is would textfields render the text precisely as textlines do... somehow I

doubt the kerning / tracking would be the same... certainly things like

vertical text etc wouldn't be possiible.

The link you shared is very promising - unfortunately the gentleman hasn't

shared how he did that so there's no way to tell what his approach is. With

a little digging it seems they make the PDF by sending the TLF textflow xml

to a server... its possible he's using something like Weborb server (

http://themidnightcoders.com/) and have a template made for the TLF xml.

Unfortunately that sounds like too specific a solution, we wouldn't be able

to take advantage of how we meet our layout spec using FTE.

Sorry for the convoluted response - I thought I'd share more food for

thought.

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