Rich formatting for PDF's directly from Actionscript

I've been using them for a project and all was going well until we hit a limitation in the libraries. We can do rich formatting and we can do automatic line wrapping and pagination, but we can't do the both together.

This would have been an enormous problem if this was a piece of commercial software as we would be completely at the mercy of the creators. However, as it is Open Source we have access to the code and we can extend it as we see fit.

And that's exactly what we did. I've added a new version of the writeText() method called very imaginatively writeText2().

It takes the same parameters but instead of taking a standard string it will render a string that has html markup. I.e. you can put a <b> tag in and your text will be bold. Eg:

For the curious you can download a sample document generated by it.

It currently supports the following tags:

• <b> Make it bold
• <u> Underline it
• <i> Make it italic
• <center> Center it
• <br /> Add a line break

The code still needs a some cleanup and more testing but it seems to be reliable now.

The two files that were changed are available for download. Or alternatively you can download the full version with changes included. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers, Mark Lynch