Tag / open source

Lanny McNie

As the dev mgr, Lanny oversees the technical day-to-day details of production and makes sure things get out the door.

@astrostyle

by Lanny McNie

Better Typography for Any Web Project

Using the SCSS Baseline Type Utility

Typographers and type enthusiasts will attest that aligning a typeface to its baseline grid is an essential part of any text-heavy design. Maintaining a consistent vertical rhythm is an important part in the creation of beautiful typography and layouts. This is accomplished easily in programs such as Adobe InDesign. However until now, I have yet to find a tool that easily accomplishes this with web type, while remaining flexible to the individual needs of a project.

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by Lanny McNie

Spelling Plus Library Open Sourced

We would like to let everyone know that Spelling Plus Library (aka SPL), our Flash/Flex spell-checking library has been released open source.

We first released SPL as a commercial component over 6 years ago, with a major overhaul to support the Text Layout Framework almost 4 years later. It was always our goal to provide a high quality, performant, and feature rich product, backed by great support. As the requirements of the industry have shifted, and the demand for Flash components has dropped, we felt it was a great time to release it to the community at large.

The entire SPL repository is now available under an MIT license, meaning it is free to use for everyone, including on commercial projects. This includes:

  • The SPL source code. Word list loader and parser, text highlighter, and spelling suggestion and replacement utilities
  • The Flex-based AIR application that helps create, modify, and export word lists
  • All examples, spikes we used for testing, and some internal demos
  • The build process to export Flash and Flex SWCs
  • Generated word lists using custom compression for US and UK English, along with tested word lists for Spanish, French, and German.

 
You can check out the GitHub repository to get everything. Feel free to submit pull requests. Please note that we are no longer supporting SPL, so any questions or issues reported may not get immediate responses.

Thanks to our supporters over the years, we are super proud of what SPL has accomplished, and hope that it will continue to see life moving forward.