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SWF as image in pdf?

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2010-06-22 02:23:29
CWB
Registered: Jun 22 2010
Posts: 3

Apologies for the super-newbie question, but I'm hoping that one of you good people will be able to solve in seconds a problem that we've been racking brains about for a few days now. Can't find anything in the archives, where most flash related topics seem to be looking at more advanced stuff than what we're doing.

We've got a web-based dashboard that displays information from a database (process management stuff) but uses flash to draw the charts in a browser window by dragging XML data.

We need to be able to, basically, print screens from this dashboard - with the final static image of the flash chart embedded therein. We can't do anything like embed commands to pull the data into Acrobat upon re-opening the document on another machine as the database won't recognise/perform authentication.

In essence, all we want to do is perform a dump of the contents of the browser window into pdf, but when we try printing to pdf, all we get is black boxes where the flash content should be.

Can it be done? If so, how?

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions you can offer.
C

PS - running A9.3.2 std, if this makes a difference.

My Product Information:
Acrobat Standard 9.3.1, Windows
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2010-06-22 06:50:10
#1
UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
I have a feeling it can't unless you resort to a bitmap screenshot (via the print screen button) - although Acrobat can create a PDF from a web page and include any embedded SWFs in that PDF, it doesn't work via the "print what you see" route - instead it goes and re-downloads all the assets for the page, so if in the browser you've set the SWF into a particular state via user input or DHTML/AJAX, none of that will appear.
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2010-06-23 00:43:13
#2
CWB
Registered: Jun 22 2010
Posts: 3
Thanks USVAR - I rather feared that might be the case.

Unless anyone can come up with a workaround, it looks like we might have to do soemthing server-side on a VM... which would not be fun!
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2010-06-23 01:31:33
#3
UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
There are some quite extensive PDF libraries available for PHP, Java etc which could probably rebuild your page based on AJAX from the user; as after all you're not trying to embed the SWF, only a copy of what it shows. Charts and graphs are a staple of both languages so if you can generate the image, you can drop it into a PDF (either a pre-made template or brand new file).

Some things you can't do (for example apply certificate security or extend rights) but the text, drawing tools, images, etc needed to make a PDF that looks like a web page are very easy to use.
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