> This has been a long standing bug that I've been complaining to Adobe about.
The new Text Layout Framework that Gumbo components use gives you control over the vertical placement of the first line. Gordon Smith Adobe Flex SDK Team From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jon Bradley Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 7:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Re: Padding/spacing before the first line in a TextArea You can't manually remove that padding from the field. It's built into the field as the ascent of the font + 4 pixels for the natural field border (which also cannot be 'removed'). There are only two ways to shift up a field in Flash: Method 1: a. Bitmap snapshot of the text field b. getColorRectBounds on the bitmap in question to retrieve a bounding rectangle of the non-alpha pixels. c. Capture the top position from the Rectangle returned from that call and subtract that value from the y-position of the field. Pros: Will work every time Cons: Additional memory overhead. Tricky to do with the Flex component architecture - especially TextArea Method 2: a. Capture font metrics from the text field b. Subtract (metrics.ascent + 4) from the text field y position. It is the ascent measurement, not descent. Pros: Less memory and less code to deal with. Cons: Will not work every time. Ascent and descent measurements from the font metrics within Flash are not accurate measurements and are only correct at very, very specific font sizes (8, 12, 17, 28, 36, 44 ... etc.). Almost all point sizes of text return incorrect ascent and descent values in Flash. They usually return values less than they really are (7,8,9 point type will return the same ascent value for most fonts, for example). Additionally, you'll still need to extend TextArea to handle the functionality. Does not function well at all with advanced antialiasing ... also a known bug in the Flash text rendering. Saffron antialiasing causes a jump in the leading and position values of lines in a field, so don't use it. ------ This has been a long standing bug that I've been complaining to Adobe about. I've worked on applications for some big greeting card companies (take a couple guesses) creating a rendering system in Flash that will match Photoshop and Illustrator text rendering. Illustrator, btw, is the only Adobe application that let's you set the first baseline position of a text field using a variety of measures. Good luck. - jon On Dec 16, 2008, at 8:53 AM, bjorn wrote: Any ideas on where I might find more info about this? .. or people who might know more ... 2008/12/2 bjorn <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> There is some padding before the first line in a TextArea. Have a look at this image to see what I mean: http://i34.tinypic.com/4uz8s0.jpg I need to remove this, and the first solution that comes to mind is to find that value and position the TextArea.y = TextArea.y - [that value]. The padding before the first line seems to be equal (in most cases) to the font's descent, which I can get from getTextLineMetrics().descent. However, this is not true in all cases. In some cases, the padding is more. Anyone have suggestions?
