g.wygonik's flash experiments

there's been a lot of discussion in the past about how Flash cannot handle RTL text entry. since i don't know how this should actually work, since i've never had to deal with RTL locales, i'm not sure i "get it".

in a past Flashcoders post (that i can't find now in the archives), i mentioned a way that it might be able to be done - but IIRC, i didn't receive any response. so, i'm in no way sure my idea was spot on, close to working, or just completely off-base.

after reading Mike's post at oddhammer.com, i remembered my idea, pulled up an old sample, cleaned up the code, and got a sample up on a server.

the basic concept is this:

- embed a reversed (horizontally) font of the characters you need - whether that's unicode in Arial, or a specific hebrew/arabic font

- create an input textfield inside a movieclip

- set the font of the textfield to the reversed font

- set all the autoSize, wordWrap, and multiline properties of the textfield as if it were a normal LTR textfield

- set the _xscale of the textfield's parent movieclip to -100 so it becomes reversed

- start typing

here's a quick sample

i'm truly curious to know if this works as it should or what else is missing (obviously, the font is wrong for hebrew/arabic - i just used a reversed Arial font i found on the net). perhaps knowing what is missing, something can be done about it. i would imagine that if this actually did work, turning it into a component shouldn't be too big a deal...

edit - i would imagine the keyboard navigation (right/left) would have to be modified as well?)