MX

What Web Designer MX Premium features
does Flash support?
The Flash vector rendering is quite primitive compared to Web Designer MX Premium's, and so you
can't use many of the more advanced Web Designer MX Premium features such as feathering, complex
transparency and fill types or soft shadows. Lines (strokes) are limited to be being simple constant
thickness, round ended lines. No line dashing is supported. The minimum line thickness is one pixel?so
thinner lines in Web Designer MX Premium will be displayed one pixel thick in Flash.
There are two aspects to producing Flash-compatible drawings. The first is to limit yourself to use only
those features supported directly by the Flash player. Secondly, when producing animations, there is an
even more limited set of characteristics that can be tweened or animated.
Web Designer MX Premium drawing features that Flash supports:

All normal line and shape drawings (although Flash is a lot less precise than Web Designer MX
Premium and so sometimes you may notice inaccuracies in lines and shapes).

Flat, linear, circular and elliptical gradient color fills.

Multi-stage gradient color fills, including linear and elliptical fills. Eight color stops maximum.

Flat transparency. Mix type only.

Graduated transparency is supported for flat color filled objects (non-graduated). So you can
have graduated color objects with flat transparency or flat color objects with graduated
transparency, but not both.

Constant width outlines (stroked paths) with rounded end caps and line joins (version 8 Flash
files support the other join and cap types).

Text, including kerning. You can use any fonts you like. The outlines of the characters of any
used fonts are embedded into the Flash file. This is much more efficient than, say, font embedding
in PDF documents.

Text on a curve. Note: the line used for the curve must be made invisible for the animation to
work.

Bitmaps and bitmap fills.

Contoned (colored) bitmaps and bitmap fills.

Photo Saturation, temperature color and blur (but not brightness / contrast change).

Fractal Cloud and Plasma fills will work, but are converted to bitmaps, so not efficient.
So while some Web Designer MX Premium effects, such as soft shadows do work in static files, these
are exported as bitmaps into the Flash file, so they are not very efficient and not suitable for animating.
What can be animated:
As listed at the start of this chapter, these are the golden rules as to what you can change from one
keyframe to the next:

Move: Move objects from one position to another.

Scale: Enlarge or reduce objects in size.

Squash or skew: Squash or skew objects.

Rotate: Rotate objects.

Transparency: Adjust the overall (flat) transparency of the object.

Color transform: Change the fill (flat) color of objects.

Or any combination of the above.
In addition, there are a few special cases of photo color transformations that are supported by Flash.
You can alter the saturation (so you can tween a full color photo into a black and white one), You can
also adjust the temperate color control (warm / cool), and also the blur value. The latter enables you to
tween a blurred photo into a sharp one. But note this only works for blur values and not sharpen. Also
there is a slight difference in the way Flash blurs photos. Flash blurs the whole photo including the edge,
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