Why did Adobe create TLF?
For displaying text, designers and publishers have mostly stuck to HTML but HTML and CSS have their limits. Flash Player provides better control over text attributes than does HTML and CSS. Moreover, as a browser plug-in that is not affected by the idiosyncrasies of specific browsers, Flash Player also makes it much easier to ensure a uniform look and feel across browsers and platforms. The Adobe-Macromedia merger provided the opportunity to give Flash’s text handling a radical upgrade, drawing on Adobe’s wealth of typographical expertise. In the wake of the merger, Adobe made major effort to do just this, with contributions from across the company, including the InDesign team. The first fruit of this effort was a new text engine in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. A beta of the Text Layout Framework, built on this new text engine, was released on Adobe Labs late last year to provide print-quality text rendering and sophisticated layouts, using device as well as embedded fonts, in a wide a
