Lesson 17. 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, in which 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 printing capabilities give you a high level of 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 you right-click or Ctrl-click on a Macintosh).