Quick Start

The following tutorial will let you quickly take any set of HTML webpages and allow you to place a Flash "Print article" button anywhere in the document. This button will, upon click, print out the article in high resolution, with a clear clean copy of the text in the article. As it is Flash, you will have complete control of the layout. Thus, the viewer can print a clean copy of the entire article, without going through all pages.

In this tutorial, "Article" refers to the multi-page HTML document you wish to use.

Step 1. If you don't have Flash, get a free 30 day trial from Macromedia.

Step 2. Download the file called "quickst.zip".

Step 3. Open the file called "article.fla".

Step 4. Frames 1 - 5 are frames designated for printing. They already contain textboxes, in which you may paste your own text.

Fig 1. The first five frames are printable.

Step 5. If you need more printable pages, insert more frames in the timeline. Just remember to label them "#p". That way they'll be printable.

Step 6. Frame number 6 in Fig 1. is labelled "#b". It constitutes the bounding box of the printable area, e.g. the area which will be scaled to the printable area for your printer.

Step 7. Export this file to "article.swf" and place it in a directory on your website.

Step 8. Now we need a button to print this article. You can either modify the button provided in "quickst.fla", or just use the one i created for you. Publish the file by pressing F12.

You should now have a .html file generated by Flash. When clicking the button, "quickst.swf" will check the Flash Player version. If the player is compatible for print, it will load "article.swf" and print it. If not, it will redirect you to a "Get Flash" button.

Step 9. Transfer "quickst.html" and "quickst.swf" to the same directory as "article.swf".

That's it.