Home/ Questions/Q 8768229
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-13T17:01:02+00:00

In an iPad app I need to see superscript and subscript and special fancy

  • 0

In an iPad app I need to see superscript and subscript and special fancy medical/science characters for foot notes and mathematical symbols. I’m using rich text and flow text as I outlined in one of my answers. However, when over over Rich Text it says:

Adobe discourages using RichText when targeting profiles: mobileDevice.

Why, exactly, is this discouraged? What problems should I expect above and beyond the limitations of RichText itself:

RichText is a low-level UIComponent that can display one or more lines of richly-formatted text and embedded images.

For performance reasons, it does not support scrolling, selection, editing, clickable hyperlinks, or images loaded from URLs. If you need those capabilities, please see the RichEditableText class.

RichText uses the Text Layout Framework (TLF) library, which in turn builds on the Flash Text Engine (FTE) in Flash Player 10. In combination, they provide rich text layout using high-quality international typography.”

Will it be slow, glichy? Will it it work if I get it to run fine on my PC running as an iPad app in Flex 4.6/Flash Builder?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I played with this a few weeks ago and the main issues I noticed were the way the OS handles the text. For instance, if you throw a RichText component that is selectable with scrolling turned (did not test how it behaved in a Scroller), it won’t scroll. Instead, your finger will act as a mouse cursor and select bits of text

    If you use RichEditableText (RichText with editing), there is no way to get built in system options such as Copy/Paste/Cut/Move or the magnifying glass while selecting.

    Additionally, there can be rendering issues. I have no examples off the top of my head, but I remembered some characters wouldn’t render correctly and foreign character support was hit-or-miss.

    As a final downside (or maybe not, depending on your feelings of the implementation), it does not use StageText (which uses the systems text rendering engine, rather than Flash’s)

    You should also view this Adobe page. It gives a full explanation about text on mobile devices and which classes are good and which are bad.

    • 0