So I just wrapped a massive Flash kiosk project. I was basically doing the assembly of another guy’s designs. He made most of the graphics in Illustrator, which I thought was going to be fine, since Illustrator exports swfs that can be imported into Flash. However, I quickly realized that exporting and importing swfs creates tons of little elements in your library. Additionally, he was making extensive use of gradients, which Flash really doesn’t seem to like. So my brilliant solution was to export his charts as pngs with alpha channel info. This seemed to work fine, except that any time they were scaled, they dithered like crazy, which was particularly noticeable anywhere there was text. What I finally wound up having to do was export any gradient parts as pngs, then export any lines, flat colors or text as swfs, then reassemble them in Flash. This was very inefficient and not really a perfect solution, as the gradients still looked bad when scaled and I still had a huge number of little parts filling up my library. I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions of ways to handle something like this in the future?
