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My beautiful Flash movie shows up as a big gray button in FrameMaker 8
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 — posted by Terry Smith
With FrameMaker 8, you can embed Flash (.SWF) files directly into FrameMaker. From there, if you use Save As PDF to create the PDF file, then your users can play Flash movies right from the PDF. Import the Flash file, Save As PDF, and go.Except that the result is not quite as advertised.
According to Adobe, the first frame in the Flash file appears where you insert the Flash file. Uh, no. What actually appears is a picture of a big gray arrow button like this:
The gray button is not what I expected or wanted. Frankly, the first frame of the Flash movie is often not great to show either.
So how can you set a poster for the Flash movie that will show up in print and in the PDF? The solution is not elegant, but it works:
1) Create a picture (probably a screen capture from the Flash movie) and place it on top of the embedded Flash file in FrameMaker (both are in the same anchored frame).
2) Add callouts such as "Click here to play movie" if you want. Here's a sample of a picture you might place over a Flash movie:
3) Select File > Save As PDF.
In the resulting PDF, the picture (and text, if any) that you placed on top of the Flash movie act like a big button. Click anywhere on the picture to play the Flash movie. The Flash movie comes to the front and covers the picture, so you can use any kind of picture and it won't affect how the Flash movie looks when it plays.
Here is a FrameMaker 8 sample file that shows the big-gray-arrow-button problem and the workaround to create a poster for the Flash movie. Also, here is the resulting PDF. This file was tested on Windows with FrameMaker 8.0 p273 (also known as the “Fat Tuesday patch” for its release date).
Want more? See this article by Jeff Freeman about importing Captivate Flash into Acrobat for tips that also apply when importing Flash into FrameMaker.
Labels: Acrobat, Flash, FrameMaker, PDF, SWF
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