Flash CS6: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20. Publishing and Exporting

You’re done designing, developing, and debugging. Your animation is ready for its audience. You’ve decided whether you want them to view it on a web page, a smartphone, a tablet, a CD, or on their computers. The next step is to publish the animation, which means packaging it in a form your audience can play. As another alternative, you may export the animation, so you (or someone else) can further edit and develop it using another graphics or animation program (like Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Fireworks). In this chapter, you’ll learn how to do both.

Using Flash’s publishing settings (Figure 20-1), you’ll see how to tell Flash to publish your animation as part of a web page, and as a standalone projector. You’ll also see how to export the artwork in your animation as editable image files. But before you publish or export, you need to learn how to optimize your animation (reduce your animation’s file size) so that it runs as quickly and efficiently as possible—a real concern if you’re planning to publish your animation on the Web or a handheld with limited memory.

Optimizing Flash Documents

It’s a fact of the digital world—big files take longer to travel the Web and load, and that creates a bottleneck for many Flash animations. The longer your audience waits, the more likely you are to lose them to another web page, or app, or quick peek at Facebook. No one has the patience to wait for a stop-and-start animation. With that in mind, you should make ...