Adding Flash, Shockwave, and FlashPaper

Because Macromedia is the maker of the Flash multimedia format, it should come as no surprise that Dreamweaver makes it easy to add many different varieties of Flash objects to your pages. The three kinds we'll discuss here are Flash animations , Shockwave animations , and FlashPaper . A Flash animation is a Flash file that has been optimized for playback on the Web. This kind of file has the .swf extension. You can play this animation in Dreamweaver, or in a Web browser. A Shockwave file is an animation format very similar to a Flash file, but it is created by Macromedia Director, rather than Macromedia Flash.

A FlashPaper document is a Flash file that has been optimized to display printed documents, in a similar manner to the Adobe Acrobat format ( Figure 8.30 ). A FlashPaper file can be displayed by any Web browser that has the free Flash Player; Macromedia claims that more than 98% of Internet users have the Flash Player.

Figure 8.30. A FlashPaper file is great for displaying documents electronically .

Tip

• Files with the . fla extension are Flash document files that can only be opened in the Flash program itself. These sorts of files can't be played in Dreamweaver or Web browsers.

To insert a Flash or Shockwave animation:

1.	Click to set the insertion point where you want the Flash or Shockwave animation to appear.
2.	Choose Insert > Media > Flash, or press Ctrl-Alt-F (Cmd-Opt-F). or Choose Insert > Media > Shockwave, or press Ctrl-Alt-D (Cmd-Opt-D). The Select File dialog appears.
3.	Navigate to the file you want, select it, and click OK (Choose). The Object Tag Accessibility Attributes dialog appears ( Figure 8.31 ). Figure 8.31. Add alternate text for the Flash or Shockwave file in the Object Tag Accessibility Attributes dialog.
4.	Enter alternate text in the Title field of the dialog.
5.	Click OK. Dreamweaver inserts the animation file into your document as a placeholder.

Tip

• The Access Key and Tab Index fields in the Object Tag Accessibility Attributes dialog are used with forms. See the "Labeling Your Fields" sidebar in Chapter 10 for more information.

To play the animation placeholder in Dreamweaver:

1.	Select the placeholder. Selection handles appear at the edges of the placeholder.
2.	Click the Play button in the Property Inspector ( Figure 8.32 ). Figure 8.32. Use the Play button in the Property Inspector to preview your animation. Dreamweaver plays the animation file in the document window.

How FlashPaper Works

FlashPaper documents are converted into the Flash file format using a printer driver called the FlashPaper Printer that is installed when you install Macromedia Contribute 3 for Windows or Macintosh (Contribute is part of the Studio 8 package). The FlashPaper document can be aligned and resized within a Dreamweaver document as you would any other graphic image. Since it is Flash, it can be resized without a loss of quality.

Because the Flash file format is especially efficient, a FlashPaper document is usually smaller, often dramatically so, than the source document. For example, in tests that we ran, the FlashPaper version of an 8 Mb Adobe Acrobat (PDF) document was only 2.6 Mb in size . A 584 Kb Word document ended up as a 182 Kb FlashPaper file. There is a big benefit to smaller download sizes for documents, as it means more users will be likely to wait while the document downloads.

While you can use FlashPaper in place of a PDF file in many applications, FlashPaper is not a complete replacement for PDF files. PDF has many collaboration and security features that FlashPaper lacks, such as annotation, digital signatures, and encryption. But like PDF, FlashPaper allows you to search for text within the FlashPaper document. You can also select and copy text.

Another limitation is that you cannot edit a FlashPaper document. If you need to update the document, you must make changes to the document you originally converted, then convert it again to a FlashPaper document.

To add a FlashPaper document:

1.	Click to set the insertion point where you want the FlashPaper document to appear.
2.	Choose Insert > Media > FlashPaper. or In the Common category of the Insert Bar, choose FlashPaper from the Media pop-up menu. The Insert FlashPaper dialog appears ( Figure 8.33 ). Figure 8.33. Define the location and size of the FlashPaper file in this dialog.
3.	Click the Browse button in the dialog. The Select File dialog appears.
4.	Navigate to the file you want, select it, and click OK (Choose). You return to the Insert FlashPaper dialog.
5.	(Optional) Set the Height and Width (in pixels) you want for the FlashPaper document.
6.	Click OK. The Object Tag Accessibility Attributes dialog appears.
7.	Enter alternate text in the Title field of the dialog.
8.	Click OK. Dreamweaver inserts the FlashPaper file into your document as a placeholder.

Tip

• You can view a preview of the FlashPaper file in Dreamweaver by selecting it and clicking the Play button in the Property Inspector, but you can only get the full functionality of FlashPaper by viewing it in a browser.