Publishing SWF's
To complete and submit your version of Lab 1, you'll need to generate an object file and its attendant pieces.
This is done with an operation called publishing, which converts your source files (.fla, .as) into an object file, suitable for processing by the Flash Player, or alternatively, into one of several types of executable or Flash Runtime. For this course, we will always use the most common type of Flash object output, a Shockwave Flash file, which has the extension .swf.
In common parlance, these files are known as Ess double-U Effs, or (if you must) swiffs.
To generate an object file and its attendant pieces, first make sure your main movie file (.fla) is the active file. Then select Publish from the File menu. That's really all you need to do: using the default settings, Flash will generate all the required files (see below).
Sometime you may want to customize the results of the Publish operation. To do this, select Publish Settings from File. The result is the dialog box you see above. The dialog has three tabs, Formats, Flash, and HMTL. The first of these allows you to specify other formats for export, such as those runtimes we mentioned above.
We won't go into detail about the controls and features available on the tabs. They are covered in the documentation included with Flash.
Suffice it to say that there are only two changes you might want to make, for the purposes of this course.
On the Formats tab, you could change the file name of the HTML file to index.htm or index.html, since every assignment in this class will require you to generate an index page for some directory on your Web site, with that page embedding the approproate .swf file.
On the Flash tab, you might want to move the JPEG Quality slider all the way to the right. This can be especially important if you are working with fine lines and/or smaller type fonts. Note that increasing JPEG quality will make your object file larger, but feel free to do that if it improves the look of your project.
In Flash CS3, the standard Publish operation generates two files in addition to the SWF. One of these is an HTML file containing the OBJECT and EMBED tags needed to display your work in a Flash Player window. The other is an external JavaScript file named AC_RunActiveContent.js. Browsers use this file to cope with cases where the Flash Player is absent or of the wrong type.
When you upload your work to the file server, transfer everything in your final version folder -- .fla, .as, .swf, and .js files. I may need to look at your source files, as well as your object output.
In later practice, all you need for a published Flash project is the .swf, .html/.htm, and .js files. If you incorporate your Flash work into an existing Web page, by copying the OBJECT/EMBED tags from the HTML page Flash generates, then you can dispense with the Flash-generated HTML and possibly the JavaScript file.
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