Making Flash pages Printable
SMW Staff Writer
12 - 01 - 00

You can read this article for indepth info on Flash printing, or take the Quick Start guide right now.

Being the premier program for web-animation, one should think that Flash was printable. This has however, not been the case. Atleast until now...

The new "Print..." Feature

The very latest version of the Flash Player - version 4.0.20 or greater, has printing as a built-in print feature. The option for printing appears whenever you right-click Flash content on the web (CTRL-click for Mac). The regular gray Flash box will have a new option - "Print..."

Selecting this feature, will invoke the traditional printing dialog.

Here, you can select the frame(s) you wish to print.

Using this print feature will print the Flash-vector artwork as PostScript, which is a highly acclaimed standard for computer-vectors. The printout will be high-quality, like printing a regular "Word" document. A neat feature is that Flash authors can control everything on the page - layout, font settings, colors, backgrounds, even the URL and date that normally appears on printed HTML documents.

An important issue, is the background color of printed documents. If the background color of your Flash page is black, and the text is white - this is what the printer will print. This will, naturally, require quite an amount of black ink. Think about it when designating printable pages.