well, I was pointed to Flaraby as a possible solution for my Arabic production woes, and I found some time this afternoon to purchase it and take a look.  The price is reasonable at only $10 (especially if it solved my production problems!) and I was able to get the ZIP with no trouble.

After looking at the code and how it works, I don’t think it will work for me.  This is not a reflection in the quality or how well it works, but rather how it accomplishes the magic.  Basically (I hope I don’t spill the beans here and give away the secret..) it’s sending the Arabic text string out to PHP where it’s prepared for display in Flash.  Here’s the show stopper for me..  Flash displays the text using vector shapes.  Yep.. each of the Arabic characters are not unicode characters (and so no bidi rules to wrestle with), but are just vector shapes that are dynamically placed in the correct position.

I think the PHP could be converted to another language easily enough if you needed it since it’s not a huge amount of code (~160 lines) and not terribly complex.

I can see how this solution could be very cool, and it obviously works well for some applications, but unfortunately not for the work I do.  sigh.  The interesting thing too.. if this were used in Flash 8 where all of the “text” could be cached as bitmap then I think the performance hit when scrolling it would be nearly nothing.

Oh, if you are interested in purchasing Flaraby then go to their main page and drill down..

On another related note..  http://www.the-right-to-flash.com seems to be gone?  That’s a shame.. ((edited to add the new link:  http://the-right-to-flash.amirdotan.com))