ripping carefully since 1978

Today I discovered that Flash CS3 JSFL reference doesn’t mention that grouped MovieClips and TextFields can be detected throught Flash Javascript API.

Documentation only says that there’s only shape.isGroup property; if true, the shape is a group.

The surprising thing is that not only shapes have the “isGroup” property but other Elements too.

For example, create TextField and group it; then create MovieClip and group it: you can easy make sure that it is possible to detect the isGroup property correctly for both of these objects!

But JSAPI documentation doesn’t say it, it only describes the isGroup property for shapes, not for any other type of stage Element.

So, you can use isGroup property for any Element JSFL object! This is very important when you doing enumeration of each elements in Documents using Flash JavaScript. Whoa!

Yesterday I faced the task of importing pretty complex Adobe Illustrator CS2 file into flash. File contained a lot of vector shapes for creation of characters like this one (there was a lot of characters in teh AI file):

First, I tried to import AI file with Flash 8 Professional. After import I’ve discovered that almost everything become bitmap — not the thing I need!

So I tried to import the same file with the Flash CS3 and got so pleasant surprise: excepting a couple of dashed strokes everything imported perfectly in vector!

More, when importing, I have the advanced dialog where can choose the import settings for each AI file layer - to import it as movieclip or raster, and so on. There’s a good option of selecting everything with [Ctrl + A] and setting the needed import details for all items by a couple of clicks.

One of the issues I’ve noticed during import was slightly changed red channel in images, but I think I should talk to my AI illustrator dude first and ask him to clear the color mode issue. He provided me the file in CMYK. So Flash CS3 warned me that I try to import file in CMYK mode, so I changed the Illustrator’s file color mode in AI and re-saved and re-imported the the document and all went good. But the slight color change seems to be here.

Respect Adobe: Illustrator Import to Flash CS3 is just a candy.