WORKING WIT FLASH

Moving the view of the Stage
When the Stage is magnified, you may not be able to see all of it. The Hand tool lets you move
the Stage to change the view without having to change the magnification.
To move the Stage view:
1 In the toolbox, select the Hand tool. To temporarily switch between another tool and the
Hand tool, hold down the Spacebar and click the tool in the toolbox.
2 Drag the Stage.

Using the grid, guides, and rulers
Flash comes with rulers and guides that help you draw and lay out objects precisely. You can place
guides in a document and snap objects to those guides, or turn on the grid and snap objects to it.
Using the grid
When the grid is displayed in a document, it appears as a set of lines behind the artwork in all
scenes. You can snap objects to the grid, and you can modify the grid size and grid line color.
To display or hide the drawing grid:
Choose View > Grid > Show Grid.
To turn snapping to grid lines on or off:
Choose View > Grid > Snap to Grid.
To set grid preferences:
1 Choose View > Grid > Edit Grid.
2 For Color, click the triangle in the color box and select a grid line color from the palette.
The default grid line color is gray.
3 Select or deselect Show Grid to display or hide the grid.
4 Select or deselect Snap to Grid to turn snapping to grid lines on or off.
5 For grid spacing, enter values in the text boxes to the right of the horizontal and vertical arrows.
6 For Snap Accuracy, select an option from the pop-up menu.
7 If you want to save the current settings as the default, click Save Default.
Using guides
You can drag horizontal and vertical guides from the rulers onto the Stage when the rulers are
displayed. You can move guides, lock guides, hide guides, and remove guides. You can also snap
objects to guides, and change guide color and snap tolerance (how close objects must be to snap
to a guide). Draggable guides appear only in the Timeline in which they were created.
To create custom guides or irregular guides, you use guide layers. See “Using guide layers” on =
To display or hide the drawing guides:
Choose View > Guides > Show Guides.
Note: If the grid is visible and Snap to Grid is turned on when you create guides, guides will snap to the grid.
To turn snapping to guides on or off:
Choose View > Guides > Snap to Guides.
Note: Snapping to guides takes precedence over snapping to the grid in places where guides fall between grid lines.
To move a guide:
Use the Arrow tool to drag the guide.
Working in Flash 21
To remove a guide:
With guides unlocked, use the Arrow tool to drag the guide to the horizontal or vertical ruler. For
information on locking and unlocking guides, see the following procedure.
To set guide preferences:
1 Choose View > Guides > Edit Guides.
2 For Color, click the triangle in the color box and select a guide line color from the palette.
The default guide color is green.
3 Select or deselect Show Guides to display or hide guides.
4 Select or deselect Snap to Guides to turn snapping to guides on or off.
5 Select or deselect Lock Guides to lock or unlock guides.
6 For Snap Accuracy, select an option from the pop-up menu.
7 If you want to remove all guides, click Clear All.
Note: Clear All removes all guides from the current scene.
8 If you want to save the current settings as the default, click Save Default.
Using rulers
When rulers are displayed, they appear along the top and left sides of the document. You can
change the unit of measure used in the rulers from the default of pixels. When you move an
element on the Stage with the rulers displayed, lines indicating the element’s dimensions appear
on the rulers.
To display or hide rulers:
Choose View > Rulers.
To specify the rulers’ unit of measure for a document:
Choose Modify > Document, and then select an option from the pop-up menu at the upper right.
Creating a new document
Each time you open Flash, the application creates a new file with the FLA extension. You can
create additional new Flash documents as you work. To set the size, frame rate, background color,
and other properties of a new document, you use the Document Properties dialog box.
You can also open a template as a new document. You can choose from standard templates that
ship with Flash, or open a template you have saved previously. For information on saving a
document file as a template, see “Saving Flash documents”.
To create a new document and set its properties:
1 Choose File > New.
2 Choose Modify > Document.
The Document Properties dialog box appears.
22 Chapter 1
3 For Frame Rate, enter the number of animation frames to be displayed every second. For
most computer-displayed animations, especially those playing from a Web site, 8 fps (frames
per second) to 12 fps is sufficient. (12 fps is the default frame rate.)
4 For Dimensions, do one of the following:
• To specify the Stage size in pixels, enter values in the Width and Height text boxes.
The default movie size is 550 x 400 pixels. The minimum size is 1 x 1 pixels; the maximum is
2880 x 2880 pixels.
• To set the Stage size so that there is equal space around the content on all sides, click the
Contents button to the right of Match. To minimize movie size, align all elements to the upper
left corner of the Stage, and then click Contents.
• To set the Stage size to the maximum available print area, click Printer. This area is determined
by the paper size minus the current margin selected in the Margins area of the Page Setup
dialog box (Windows) or the Print Margins dialog box (Macintosh).
• To set the Stage size to the default size, click Default.
5 To set the background color of your movie, click the triangle in the Background Color box and
select a color from the palette.
6 To specify the unit of measure for rulers that you can display along the top and side of the
application window, select an option from the pop-up menu in the upper right. See “Using
rulers” on page 21. (This setting also determines the units used in the Info panel.)
7 Do one of the following:
• To make the new settings the default properties for your new document only, click OK.
• To make these settings the default properties for all new documents, click Make Default.
To open a template as a new document:
1 Choose File > New from Template.
2 In the New Document dialog box, select a category from the Category list, and select a
document from the Category Items list.
3 Click OK.
Setting preferences in Flash
Flash lets you set preferences for general application operations, editing operations, and
Clipboard operations. See also “Choosing drawing settings”\.
To set preferences:
1 Choose Edit > Preferences.
2 Click the General, Editing, Clipboard, Warning, or ActionScript Editor tab, and choose from the
respective options as described in the procedures that follow. For more information on
ActionScript Editor preferences, see “Setting Actions panel preferences” under Help > Using
Flash.
Working in Flash 23
To set general preferences, choose from the following options:
• For Undo Levels, enter a value from 0 to 200 to set the number of undo/redo levels. Undo
levels require memory; the more undo levels you use, the more system memory is taken up.
The default is 100.
• For Printing Options (Windows only), select Disable PostScript to disable PostScript
output when printing to a PostScript printer. By default, this option is deselected. Select this
option if you have problems printing to a PostScript printer, but keep in mind that this will
slow down printing.
• For Selection Options, select or deselect Shift Select to control how Flash handles selection of
multiple elements. When Shift Select is off, clicking additional elements adds them to the
current selection. When Shift Select is on, clicking additional elements deselects other
elements unless you hold down the Shift key.
• Select Show Tooltips to display tooltips when the pointer pauses over a control. Deselect this
option if you don’t want to see the tooltips.
• For Timeline Options, select Disable Timeline Docking to keep the Timeline from attaching
itself to the application window once it has been separated into its own window. For more
information, see “Using the Timeline”
• Select Span Based Selection to use span-based selection in the Timeline, rather than the default
frame-based selection (Flash 5 used span-based selection). For more information on span-based
and frame-based selection, see “Working with frames in the Timeline”
• Select Named Anchor on Scenes to have Flash make the first frame of each scene in a movie a
named anchor. Named anchors let you use the Forward and Back buttons in a browser to jump
from scene to scene in a movie. For more information, see “Using named anchors”
• For Highlight Color, select Use This Color and select a color from the palette, or select Use
Layer Color to use the current layer’s outline color.
• For Font Mapping Default, select a font to use when substituting missing fonts in movies you
open in Flash. See “Substituting missing fonts”.
To set editing preferences, choose from the following options:
• For Pen Tool options, see “Setting Pen tool preferences” .
• For Vertical Text options, select Default Text Orientation to make the default orientation of
text vertical, which is useful for some Asian language fonts. By default, this option is
deselected.
• Select Right to Left Text Flow to reverse the default text display direction. This option is
deselected by default.
• Select No Kerning to turn off kerning for vertical text. This option is deselected by default, but
is useful to improve spacing for some fonts that use kerning tables.
• For Drawing Settings, see “Choosing drawing settings”

To set Clipboard preferences, choose from the following options:
• For Bitmaps (Windows only), select options for Color Depth and Resolution to specify these
parameters for bitmaps copied to the Clipboard. Select Smooth to apply anti-aliasing. Enter a
value in the Size Limit text box to specify the amount of RAM that is used when placing a
bitmap image on the Clipboard. Increase this value when working with large or
high-resolution bitmap images. If your computer has limited memory, choose None.
• For Gradients (Windows only), choose an option to specify the quality of gradient fills placed
in the Windows Metafile. Choosing a higher quality increases the time required to copy
artwork. Use this setting to specify gradient quality when pasting items to a location outside of
Flash. When you are pasting within Flash, the full gradient quality of the copied data is
preserved regardless of the Gradients on Clipboard setting.
• For PICT Settings (Macintosh only), for Type, select Objects to preserve data copied to the
Clipboard as vector artwork, or select one of the bitmap formats to convert the copied artwork
to a bitmap. Enter a value for Resolution. Select Include PostScript to include PostScript data.
For Gradients, choose an option to specify gradient quality in the PICT. Choosing a higher
quality increases the time required to copy artwork. Use the Gradients setting to specify
gradient quality when pasting items to a location outside of Flash. When you are pasting within
Flash, the full gradient quality of the copied data is preserved regardless of the Gradient setting.
• For FreeHand Text, select Maintain Text as Blocks to keep text editable in a pasted FreeHand file.
To set warning preferences, choose one of the following options:
• Select Warn on Save for Macromedia Flash 5 Compatibility to have Flash warn you when you
try to save documents with Flash MX–specific content to a Flash 5 file. This option is selected
by default.
• Select Warn on Missing Fonts to have Flash warn you when you open a Flash document that
uses fonts that are not installed on your computer. This option is selected by default.
• Select Warn on Loss of Expert Mode Formatting to have Flash warn you of any expert mode
formatting that will be lost when you switch to normal mode in the Actions panel. This option
is selected by default.
• Select Warn on Reading Generator Content to have Flash display a red “X” over any Generator
objects, as a reminder that Generator objects are not supported in Flash MX.
• Select Warn on Inserting Frames when Importing Content to have Flash alert you when it
inserts frames in your document to accommodate audio or video files that you import.