Producing Excel reports from Flash

Every new version of Flash comes with a train and a little wagon of nice new features.
Despite all the improvements there are still a few things in Flash technology that aren’t just there, and generating professionally looking printable reports is one of them.  Printing dynamic (data-driven) content from Flash has always been a difficult task. No doubt that the PrintJob class that’s been added to the application API in version 7 has been a huge improvement, yet it hasn’t solved all the problems.
While Flash is very good for printing high resolution graphics (because of its native support for vector graphic format) some tasks that are considered basic in browser environment are very difficult to achieve.

Working with Text in Flash 8 ActionScript

In this article, I’m going to look at some of the new text features that are available using ActionScript in Flash 8. If you have read some of the earlier articles, you’ll have seen that Flash 8 includes some improved text options.

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Out of my mind: Flash 8 Power

Flash 8 uses FlashType - a new text rendering engine. It provides high-quality text rendering, especially at small font sizes so that the appearance of text is improved in Flash Player 8. FlashType can’t be used with earlier Flash Players but it is automatically selected when you publish to the Flash 8 player.  Flash 8 also includes other options for working with text including new ActionScript properties for the TextFormat class and new anti-aliasing settings.

Drawing API enhancements part 2

Enhanced Drawing Features in Flash 8 - part 2

Flash 8 contains many new features within ActionScript that you can use when publishing to Flash Player 8. The Drawing API contains enhancements and, in this article, I’m going to look at the following areas.

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Out of my mind: Flash 8 Power

• Additional options when creating a gradient
• A new method to create a line with a gradient
• A new method that allows you fill a movie clip with a bitmap

We’ll work through a series of examples so you can see how these new features work. In the first article, I looked at the changes that have been made to the lineStyle method. You don’t need to have completed that article before reading this one.

You’ll need a copy of Flash 8 to see the features covered in this article. You can download a trial copy from the Macromedia Web site. You should also install Flash Player 8 so you can publish these features. Because they include changes to ActionScript, you can’t publish to Flash Player 7 and earlier. Note that the code samples within this article all use AS2.0.

You can download the sample files for the tutorial from the blue Properties box that contains the article PDF. There's a heading titled Code Download and you can click the Details link next to it to get the zip file. The download includes the starter files you'll need as well as the completed files.

We’ll start by looking at how you can work with gradients.

Creating a tool tip with AS2.0 classes

Creating a tool tip with AS2.0 classes

You see tool tips in most software packages. For example, in Flash you’ll see a tool tip when you move your mouse over an icon in the Toolbox. If you read the last tutorial, you’ll have discovered how to create a tool tip movie clip that you can reuse in your Flash applications using ActionScript 1.0. We used ActionScript to attach a movie clip that we’d created in the Library. To reuse the tool tip, you needed to add the movie clip to the Library of the Flash movie and add ActionScript.

In this tutorial, I’m going to create the same tool tip using AS2.0 classes. The tool tip is created entirely through code with no movie clip to install. The advantage is that all you have to do is place the ActionScript class file within the same folder as the Flash movie. You can also add it with the other classes and refer to it using the package name.

Enhanced Drawing Features in Flash 8 - part 1

Flash 8 includes a number of enhancements to the ActionScript language. There are a range of new classes and enhanced functionality for existing features. When you use these new features, you’ll need to publish to Flash Player 8.