In the last few days, since receiving our copies of CS4, we’ve been experimenting on and off with the new typographic capabilities in Flash CS4. The way it seemed, at least from previews and early tutorials, was that Flash had entered a new era in how it treated type, with opentype functionality, multi-column layouts, etc., and what’s more, InDesign was supposedly now able to export to Flash, meaning that theoretically, anything you could do in InDesign could now be further developed in Flash.

But we’ve been seeing some strange things so far, two big implications of which seem to be that:

1) the new OT support is more of a Flash Player 10, programmatic thing (i.e., not for WYSIWYG, stage-oriented Flash users).

2) exporting an .xfl from ID is pretty much the end of the line as far as easily maniulating the content goes. The text frames comes into Flash all kinds of wonky, and OT alternate glyphs becoming broken apart in that weird-looking Flash way.

At least it looks like you no longer have to restart Flash when you activate a new font in Suitcase.

Please add or refute.