MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-USING FLASH - Working with Flash Documents

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CHAPTER 1
Working with Flash
Documents
When you create and save Macromedia Flash Basic 8 and Macromedia Flash Professional 8
documents within the Flash authoring environment, the documents are in FLA file format.
To display a document in Macromedia Flash Player, you must publish or export the
document as a SWF file.
You can add media assets to a Flash document and manage the assets in the library, and you
can use the Movie Explorer to view and organize all the elements in a Flash document. The
Undo and Redo commands, the History panel, and the Commands menu let you automate
tasks in a document.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Creating or opening a document and setting properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Using document tabs for multiple documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Saving Flash documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
About adding media content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
About creating motion and interactivity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
About components. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Managing media assets with the library. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
About ActionScript. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
About Multiple Timelines and levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
About nested movie clips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Using absolute and relative target paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
About scenes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Working with scenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Using the Movie Explorer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Using Find and Replace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Using the Undo, Redo, and Repeat menu commands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
NOTE
For information on publishing or exporting a file, see Chapter 17, “Publishing,” on
page 455 or Chapter 18, “Exporting,” on page 501.