How does Buzzword work? +

David Coletta has made a post about Buzzword's style inspector (an internal debugging tool) and how it helps examine the internal structure of a Buzzword document.

From the post:

The underlying data structure of Buzzword's document model is an object tree. The root of the tree is the document, which contains sections, which contain paragraphs, which contain runs, which contain text itself. At every level of the tree, objects can have styles. So, for example, a paragraph object can have styles like spaceBefore, spaceAfter, and lineSpacing. And a run can have styles like bold, italic, and underline. Styles are represented as a list of name-value pairs: bold=true, italic=false, and so on. ...

Does this object tree correspond to the tree of visual objects used to display the text?

The Buzzword page layout uses a collection of TextField objects distributed intelligently across the body of text. However, the physical structure of the document as it is rendered on screen is probably very different from its underlying logical structure. For example, a run of text that goes "The quick brown fox jumped over the wall" might be interrupted visually as an image placed above it cuts through its centre, whereas logically the said image could be part of the previous sentence or even the previous paragraph.

Of course, I'm just speculating here.

It would be nice if someday the Buzzword team could reveal the program's internal workings vis-a-vis handling of large amounts of text and those layout algorithms. Buzzword is truly one of the most innovative uses of the Flash platform since the version 9 release (the big leap). I think it's a work of genius.