Flash Fox and Bono Bear (Chimps) (Chimps Series)

13.4. Testing Inside a Web Page

In addition to letting you test your animation in Flash Player, Flash lets you test your animation embedded in a Web page. This option lets you see how your animation looks in a Web browser based on the animation alignment, scale, and size options Flash lets you set.

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Testing Multiple Animations

Some folks find a tabbed pagelike the tabs in some Web browserseasier to pop back to, especially if they're trying to test several different animations at once. If you'd rather Flash Player appear in a tabbed page, select Edit Preferences (Windows) or Flash Preferences (Mac).

In the Preferences window that appears, click the General category. Turn on the checkbox next to " Open test movie in tabs." Then, exit and relaunch Flash, reopen your document, and then choose Control Test Movie. This time, Flash Player appears as a tab. When you click the tab, the Flash developer menu options change to the Flash Player options.

Here's how it works. You tell Flash in the Formats tab of the Publish Settings window (Figure 13-4, left) that you want to embed your animation in a Web page. Then, in the HTML tab, you tell Flash how you want your animation to appear in the Web page (Figure 13-4, right). When you choose File Publish Preview, Flash constructs an HTML file containing your animation, and then loads it automatically into the Web browser on your computer.

Note: Tucking your animation into a Web page is the most popular publishing option, but it's not the only one Flash offers. You get acquainted with the other publishing options, including publishing your animation as a QuickTime movie and a standalone Flash projector file, in Chapter 14.
Figure 13-4. Left: Flash offers several publishing options, one of which is embedding your animation into an HTML file.

Right: Flash constructs an animation-containing HTML file based on the options you choose in this tab. The name Flash uses for your HTML file is the name of your Flash document, but with an .html extension.

To test your animation inside a Web page:

  1. Choose File Publish Settings .

    The Publish Settings dialog box in Figure 13-4 (left) appears.

  2. Make sure the "HTML (.html)" checkbox is turned on, then click the HTML tab .

    Flash displays the contents of the HTML tab shown in Figure 13-4 (right).

  3. Click the arrow next to Template, and then, from the drop-down box that appears, choose "Flash only."

  4. Click OK .

  5. Flash accepts your changes and closes the Publish Settings dialog box .

    Note: For a description of each of the settings on this tab, see Section 14.2.1.

  6. Choose File Publish Preview .

Figure 13-5. Left: When you see this dialog box, you know Flash is busy creating an HTML file based on the options you set in the Publish Settings dialog box.

Right: In addition to creating an HTML file, choosing File Publish Preview launches your Web browser preloaded with that file.

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