Current state of text rendering

[Ender22]

Hello, I'm looking to increase our text rendering capabilities in our app, and wondering if I am correct on the current state of things or if I am missing something. I saw recently there was some changes in the release notes related to text rendering, but I haven't really understood if any of the core issues have been addressed.

Note: My project uses Starling and Feathers and we support many languages that have many characters (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, Korean) so it cannot use bitmap fonts, and the app is released for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac

As far as I know:

• If you want to support HTML text, i.e. bullets, bold tags, etc you need to use TextFieldTextEditor (flash.text.TextField) as it is the only text renderer that supports HTML
• If you want to support displaying emojis, then you need to use StageTextTextEditor (flash.text.StageText) as it is the only text render that supports emojis. (does not support embedded fonts)
• If you want to support RTL languages, then you need to use TextBlockTextRenderer (i.e. on a feathers label) as it is the only text render that supports RTL.

So there is no way to:

• Render a block of text containing emojis using your app's desired font (need to use device font instead)
• Render a block of text with both bullets and emojis
• Render RTL text with HTML, or RTL + emojis.

This obviously brings a lot of challenges for an app that has features such as client-created news posts:

• We need to be checking the value of all text and switching between different text renderers for the same components
• We either have to remove emojis or HTML elements from any entered text (chatgpt generated news posts always seem to have both)
• RTL languages cannot support HTML or emojis, so they need to be removed from all text those users see

Thanks for any tips or advice

[ajwfrost]

The emoji support has been improved in the other text field types, so generally the TextBlock based text field gives the best functionality. But yes, lacking in supporting HTML tags.

• StageText uses the operating system rather than any internal rendering so embedded fonts can't be used.
• You should be able to include bullets and emojis in TextBlock although if you mean bullets added via <LI> etc then yes, those would need to be interpreted separately.
• RTL + HTML, yes is a problem, RTL + emojis should be working now. If you have issues using emoji glyphs - particularly if using embedded fonts - then please check your fonts do actually have the requested glyphs in them.

Currently within the older/original TextField implementation, there is just a basic HTML interpreter that goes through to extract styles, create bullet characters etc. So it should be possible to replicate that as a pre-processing step within the handling for TextBlock.

There's also a request to create a single/better text field mechanism i.e. using a simpler API like TextField but including the advanced layout capabilities of FTE i.e. like TextBlock/TextLine.

One current restriction with TextBlock font handling is that it doesn't cope with "CFF2" font tables, just with the original "CFF". We're looking at that currently - although of course, if you're using embedded fonts then this is something that can be handled in the build process.

Summary I think:

• most powerful is TextBlockTextRenderer which should support emojis as well as RTL and advanced layout capabilities
• this lacks HTML support but we should be able to create a pre-processing step for this to match the TextField functionality

Hope that helps. See also:

• [Feature Request] Simplify TextLine FTE (Flash Text Engine) usage #3757 - simplifying the TextBlock (FTE) APIs to make it easier to use, like TextField
• GPU Rendering for Text & Vector Graphics #3725 - improving rendering of text via GPU acceleration e.g. via external 'Slug' library