November and December have been very busy months. Daniel and I are working very hard in order to release a new version of Creative Docs .NET before Christmas... 2005. Our main goal is to ship a stable, even if not fully finished, new text object (known as
Text II), since the one implemented in version 1.1 was really lame.
The new text object supports following properties:
- Font face and style, bold and italic inversions, absolute and relative font size, font glue, font color, kerning, ligatures, special glyphs, glyph substitutions, numerous spaces, etc.
- Underline, overline, strike out with position, width and color.
- Superscripts and subscripts, with relative size and offset.
- Alignment (left, right, center), justification & hyphenation.
- Leading (fixed or automatic) and grid fitted paragraph or line alignment.
- Spacing (space before paragraph, space after paragraph).
- Keeps (keep at least n lines together, keep with following or preceding paragraph)
- Start paragraph at new frame, new page, odd page, even page.
- Padding (left, right, indentation level).
- Rich tabs (left, right, centered, decimal point, etc.).
- Language (hyphenation only available in French for now).
However, you'll have to wait until 2006 to get your hands on
text styles,
bullets and
numbered lists. Because of time constraints, we decided against trying to finish the user interface related to these features. But most of the low level code is already in place now; e.g. styles are used internally to represent local settings.