Digital Workshop

I've been playing with Macromedia's new version of Flashpaper and am very impressed with how it works. It installs as a printer driver and produces a swf file that behaves rather like a pdf: scrollable, searchable, screenreadable. You can basically instantly print any document to an swf file and it retains all formatting. The flashpaper files are smaller than Acrobat files and there isn't the dreaded delay that recent bloated versions of the Acrobat reader have on opening. They just sit natively in any web page.

What is more ... they seem to quite happily import into Opus Flex publications as video objects. I did get a warning about the frame rate being different to the Opus Flex publication but this is tweakable at the publishing stage in Opus and the finished publication worked well. (Judicious use of an opaque top level layer in Opus also gets rid of Macromedia's branding if desired.)

It will be a real timesaver for me when dealing with text-heavy publications.

There's a free 30 day trial at the Macromedia site.

Andrew

Thanks for that Andrew, looks interesting -- I'm looking for a way to get rid of the acrobat reader for some reading materials.

Paul

I downloaded this and took a look at it. I have a project right now that I thought might be applicable. I used an original Word document containing a certificate into FP. I tried printing it and the print looked horrible, so not sure about the printing aspect, but the conversion seemed real easy.

Hi Andrew

You wrote:



I am intersted to read more about how exactly you were integrating/importing the Flashpaper produced *.swf files into Opus.

Can you post a sample?

Thank you.
Nick

Hi,

Thank you for your enquiry.

Flash files can be imported into Opus using a Video object or a DocView object. However, please note that the Video object uses the QuickTime ActiveX control to display the Flash file and this does not support ActionScript or heavily-interactive Flash movies.

I assume that Andrew was using a DocView object to import the FlashPaper document. This uses the Flash Player plug-in for the default Internet browser and should therefore be fully-interactive.

Kind regards,

Thank you for your help.
I am successful in importing interactive swf documents either way (DocView or Internet Browser).

My particular interest in this Flashpaper-topic is related to the hyperlinks converted from a Word document using Flashpaper. The hyperlinks turn into weblinks (i.e. if a hyperlink in Word is set to c:\doc1.swf, in e.g. DocView the flash file will search for http://www.doc1.swf and not for c:\doc1.swf) (hope this makes sense?!). I wonder why?

I understand that this might not be related to Opus directly but hopefully of interest for Opus users.

Nick

Nick, I just installed FlashPaper to check out your situation. Using Word 2002 (XP) I created two links, both to a local file called menu.php. In the first instance I highlighted the link, right-clicked and chose Hyperlink, then typed in c:\menu.php. Same for the second except I typed in file:///c:\menu.php. Word linked both properly to the file and the exported FlashPaper swf worked correctly for both links.

Perhaps you are using an older version of Word or perhaps you need to add the file:/// in front of the hyperlinked filename for it to work properly as you would if you were writing in HTML.

Thank you duddley

I just cannot figure it out.

I did try to implement you suggestions - tried on two different machines - still no luck

Could you post or send privately your Opus file incl. attachments to test?

Thanks again.
nick

Nick, I thought I'd take just a minute and upload the swf file I created - but you're right; there's a problem. FlashPaper itself is not properly converting the hyperlinks to the correct html and hardcoding a local url isn't working. It does work for relative local urls but not fully qualified paths. I had erroneously jumped to the conclusion that is was working.

Sorry.