Printing Movies Overview - Page 3

This sounds too good to be true
Murphy's Law states if something is too good to be true, it is. But it's not a bad as i'm making out. You just have to take into consideration its drawbacks and work with them. Let's have a look at them.

1. No Print Preview.
Your visitor won't be able to see what is about to be printed. So it is very important tell the visitor what he/she is about to print. As a developer, test it, test it, test it! There can be nothing more embarrassing than creating a super-shmick site only to print out an ill-formatted, letter or brochure that looks something like the office idiot created.

2. Must have a Browser.
Printing in Flash can only be done with a browser so standalone Flash projector will not be able to print.

3. Can't Print Effects.
Flash will output objects in your movie to a printer as they are in the library. Therefore any tweening, transform or alpha effects applied to your objects will not translate to the printed form. So when developing printable content apply the KISS (keep it simple stupid!) principle.

4. Latest Version Required.
You will need to place some plug-in version detection code when you publish printable flash content. If you visitor doesn't have the latest version you won't get the desired effect and your visitor may end up with more that you bargained for! Fortunately, the latest version of Flash Player comes with a new global variable, $version, which allows you to the check the version number of your visitor's Flash Player then print the main timeline if it is above 20. Add the following code to the On MouseEvent Action.

On (Release)
   Set Variable: "playerversion" = eval("$version")
     Set Variable: "versionnumber" = Substring ( playerversion, 9, 2 )
   If (versionnumber >= 20)
      Get URL ("print:", window="/")
   End If
End On