Lesson 21. Printing and Context Menus

Flash gives you a great amount of control over the process of printing content within the Flash movie window. You can print content that is not displayed onscreen as well as print the content within specific movie clips, frames, or levels. Unlike printing Web pages from your browser, where all graphical content is printed as bitmaps, Flash gives you the option to print certain graphical content as a bitmap or vector image (which produces results that are crisp and colorful). In addition, Flash allows you to gather information about a user's printer such as the dimensions of the paper and the default paper orientation so that printing can be customized even further. All this printing control is made possible by Flash's built-in PrintJob class.

Flash's new printing capabilities give you greater control over many aspects of printing Flash content, including the area to print.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the PrintJob class to print content in various ways. You will also be introduced to the ContextMenu class so that you can add your own custom print options to the context menu (the menu that appears when the right mouse button is clicked and released).

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

In this lesson, you will:

• Distinguish between printing from Flash and printing from the browser

• Learn how to use the PrintJob class

• Print content as a bitmap or vector

• Create a custom context menu

• Add custom items to a context menu

APPROXIMATE TIME

This lesson takes approximately 45 minutes to complete.

LESSON FILES

Starting Files:

Lesson21/Assets/PrintArea1.fla

Lesson21/Assets/ContextMenu1.fla

Completed Projects:

PrintArea2.fla

ContextMenu2.fla