Publishing
March 15, 2000
|
That was a lot of work; and we still
don't have anything we can view in a browser. Luckily Flash has
a built-in utility to publish our work, (the artist formerly known
as Aftershock).
|
To publish our creation, let's look at our publish settings first
(CTRL - SHIFT - F12 or File > Publish Settings). The tab that
shows by default is Formats. You just check which formats you want
Flash to publish, (you could see the penguin as a projector,
Quicktime movie, or animated .gif). Accept the default values of
Flash and HTML and go to the Flash tab.
Check the "Protect from Import" box. (This is theoretically supposed
to prevent other Flashers from importing an .swf that you publish on
the web. Unfortunately, one of the first product genres to appear
following the release of the Flash SDK was the unprotectors. These
programs, which are freely available at a lot of sites, crack the
protect feature so that anyone can import your work. Keep this in
mind if you ever develop a Flash application that uses any kind of
sensitive information in the movie). Accept the defaults for the
other settings and click the HTML tab.
For now, let's just worry about 2 settings in the HTML Publish section:
Dimensions and Loop. The Dimensions setting controls the size of the
movie in the browser. Let's choose percent and accept the default of
100. This works great for movies that contain mostly words, or shapes
that still look good if skewed just a little.
The loop setting controls the movie playback (i.e. whether the movie
plays again after it runs through the frames from beginning to end).
Click the check box to deselect Loop. (As you become comfortable with
constructing actions and complex movies, this setting will become
irrelevant, since the order in which the movie plays will be
controlled internally).
You can also select "No Border" in the Scale option to reduce the size
of the border around the Flash File in the final HTML document.
At this point click the Publish button. You now have an swf file and
the html page to frame it in the same directory as the .fla.
Click OK and save your work.
If you like, you can see your shiny new page by opening it from the
local folder where you saved it, (the .swf doesn't need any special
environment other than the Flash player).
Notes on the HTML that Flash cranks out:
Hands down the coolest thing that Flash does for you when it creates
HTML is listing all your movie text and URL's in comment tags. Since
most of us are under the gun to produce some kind of results with some
kind of web site, we will take any help we can get to get our pages
noticed by the search engines. These comment tags help.
The <EMBED> tag will probably cause lights and alarms to activate
on the Bat Computer if you are checking for HTML 4.0 standard compliance.
If you are going to use Flash together with other elements on a page,
I would recommend you let Flash publish its HTML doc so you can copy
those handy comment tags, then open your favorite editor and place it
where you want it.
More Variables
0 to 60 in Flash
FS Commands
|
