Is there any way to import an SVG file into MX 2004 (or any version of Flash for that matter)?
I’ve got a logo built in Illustrator that I need to import/export into Flash for use in a product demo.
When I export the logo as a SWF in Illustrator CS, the SWF version looks fine when opened outside of Flash in the default player, but when I import it into flash it gets garbled and looks nothing like it did when opened outside of MX 2004.
I want to retain the original vector-based logo, but since it contains gradients and drop-shadows (design cliches I know, but I didn’t make it) when it’s exported/imported it either gets rasterized (AI, SWF, EPS, etc. all rasterize the gradients and/or drop-shadows) or it looks like **** with lossy pixelization and color mis-matches.
The best format that doesn’t rasterize anything is SVG, but I cannot find any native way of importing it into Flash MX 2004…given that SVG and SWF are basically two competing vector-based web technologies. Any way to make them get along?
Or, is there a better, loss-less way of going from Illustrator to Flash?
exporting to swf is the best way to get it into Flash, but the swf file format doesnt support everything that illustrator does. There will almost undoubtedly be a loss in quality/information when going from ai to swf/fla. SVG is similar in that it is more (?) than Flash, or at least handles vector differently. I dont know the details of SVG but I do believe it supports much more than SWF can.
There is no SVG import that I know of though there is some basic conversions from simple SVG interpreted through actionscript and drawn dynamically in Flash. This, however, is slow, and more or less supports less than you would get going in through Flash via the IDE.
I think you’ll probably just have to get what you can through a swf export and rebuild the rest in Flash manually.
The thing is that MM has effeciency in mind with swf, wanting small portable graphics that can be handled by small, quickly downloaded plugins. With that intention, functionality will suffer and with that a lack of support for those other formats which wish to be the solve-all standard solution for everything (such as SVG is trying to be).
I think it’s far more efficient to have a small SWF backed with a few lines of AS than to have SVG with a Java programming backend.
It’d just be handy if Macromedia and Adobe could merge so I that I’d be able to get a good import of this logo. Just for that reason: so I can import a logo. What better reason for a competitor-merger?
