At Idea Stage: Indirect Text Support via Flash App

(This question is more for the community than FF Inc.)

I am toying with the idea of writing a Flash tool that would (in a somewhat roundabout manner) enable bringing fonts into FF. I will describe the idea and I would like your comments and suggestions as to the need for such a tool and improvements in the planned functionality.

The idea: A standalone Flash application that generates an image with a grid of the Latin characters (or a given subset thereof, such as lower case, upper case or numbers, etc.) from any font installed in the users system. Alternatively, you could type in something. The application would save this output as an image.

Then you can load this image (either the character grid or the typed text) to Filter Forge for forging other things from it. I could make a basic snippet for picking the right letters from the grid to get you started.

So, my questions are:

1) Is there any sense in doing this to begin with, as you can pretty easily do so in any image editor?

2) If yes, do you have any additional features you would want to have in such an application?

3) Any interface-related ideas?

Something to think about while we wait for text support to miraculously appear in the next version

I think such a tool would be usefull mostly for those who don't have the software or the knowledge to input text as an image.

You should consider using HTML5 instead of Flash, as Flash is supposed to be a dying breed. Adobe has decided to go with HTML5 with Adobe Edge, which looks very similar to Flash pro.

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You should consider using HTML5 instead of Flash, as Flash is supposed to be a dying breed. Adobe has decided to go with HTML5 with Adobe Edge, which looks very similar to Flash pro.

Well, that's a annoying. Meaning that I've just barely gotten over having to switch fr om ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3 and now the whole program is on its way out. Sounds like now I have to switch to JavaScript?? I've always felt it is a rather lim ited graphics programming language but hopefully I have got it wrong.

Anyways, thanks for the suggestion. I'm downloading Edge Animate Preview to see what it is all about. I hope there is going to be a way to save images to local HD. Flash doesn't have that capability either, but Zinc and other SWF wrappers do that. So there goes the usefulness of my recent Zinc acquisition as well?

Oh, how does one ever keep up with the speed with which technologies change...?

This is a great idea and would be very useful and good to have, BUT I wonder if FF 4.0 will have support for Text already built-in?

Of course that even if FF 4.0 has already text, this could be still useful for all the FF 3.0 users that can´t or do not want to upgrade to 4.0.

I do not know how hard, difficult or easy this may be for you, but must think if this will be worth to make without knowing if FF 4.0 will support text or not?

Well I have to say that thanks to your great and very useful TD Europa Sans Caps Proc Font Advanced by ThreeDee with a modification I have made you can already use the alphabet shapes on many filters, although of course that in this case you ONLY have this font and can´t change it for the one you would want.

BUT if you want to have your OWN font choosen from the thousands available you can use the fonts as Images for the source into FF as I have already shown here You can use PSD Fonts Letters inside your filters NOW ! without FF 4.0

ALso CFandM have thought and got also an innovative way to include numbers through images inside FF in his great and amazing The Numbers Game also can be seen more details of this technique here -> Would it be possible to make this Typography effect in Filter Forge? and there is more also here

Although of course that your idea and suggestion would be much better than these three above, and you could be able to importa real text using the grids for FF to recognize the text, BUT if FF 4.0 support text will be even easier and better.

So we will have to wait and see what happens