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Inside Adobe’s Open Source Framework

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By Contel Bradford

Adobe Systems recently announced the immediate release of two new open source technologies for its Adobe Flash Platform. OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) and TLF (Text Layout Framework) are geared toward developers, publishers and media companies looking to create new revenue strategies and business opportunities for publishing media-rich content on the web. Formerly a part of the Strobe project, OSMF provides developers with the ability to build feature-rich, advanced media players for the Flash Platform in a easier, faster and more efficient manner. With TLF, developers can introduce more robust typographic functionality to a wide variety of web-based applications.

To no surprise, these frameworks are being rapidly adopted by the open source community. Mark Stanley, founder of online content publishing company makebook, says its developers are already benefitting from TLF. “APIs that are standard in the open source Text Layout Framework from Adobe gave us a jumpstart as we leveraged the high-end components for makebook.com.” This particular framework goes far beyond the text layouts enabled by programming technologies such as CSS and HTML as it supports bidirectional text, complex server-side languages, multi-columns and other typographical capabilities. According to Stanley, “With TLF we can more easily provide our customers with quality typography features and the text layout control they require for their self-publishing projects.”

Dave McAllister, Adobe spokesperson and director of standards and open source platform BU, said Adobe was prompted to open OSMF and TLF to the developer community for wider acceptance of the technology. “With regards to the Text Layout Framework (TLF) — for displaying text, designers and publishers have mostly stuck with HTML, but HTML and CSS have their limits. Flash Player 10, which includes a text engine with TLF, provides better control over text attributes. 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 operating systems.”

Adobe’s wealth of typographical expertise provided the opportunity to give the text-handling ability in Flash Player a radical upgrade, with contributions from across the company including the InDesign team. The first fruit of this effort was the new text engine in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. A beta of the Text Layout Framework (TLF), 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 array of alphabets.

Releasing the TLF source code as open source empowers developers to extend and enhance TLF to suit their own needs and to contribute to the evolution of the framework.

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