The Options tab in the Publishing Settings dialog for Opus Flex publications is different than for the other types of publications you can create in the Publish Wizard.
1. Tick the Splash Screen option if you want a splash screen to appear.
When the published Adobe Flash (swf) file is used over a network or internet, as opposed to when you test it directly off your hard drive, there may be a significant delay before it becomes visible. To let the user know that everything is all right Opus can add a splash screen that show the progress of the file download.
By default, this option is selected. You can use one of the following options:
The Default splash screen. This is a simple bitmap that announces the tool used to create the Flex file.
A Custom splash screen. Use the Browse… button to locate the graphic you want to use as your splash screen – the graphic can be in any supported graphic format. As well as your graphic you can tick Include Opus Logo to show the standard Opus logo with your graphic.
A Custom Preloader, which allows you to specify a SWF file that will be displayed while the publication preload is occurring. This allows a customized professional look to your publication.
Note:
Unfortunately this SWF cannot be produced by Flex itself because Flex created SWF cannot do anything until the support script is loaded, which is exactly when the preload must be active. However there are a range of preset preloaders to choose from, or you can create one of your own using Presto, or indeed Adobe Flash itself.
On the technical side the preload SWF becomes a movie clip/sprite on the first frame of the Flex SWF. It is not loaded using loadMovie but is directly inserted into the SWF. The clip is offset so as to be centred on the publication. There exists a variable in the preloader movie clip/sprite called '_DW_Progress' which is set to the percentage of the preloading that has occurred. When this percentage reaches 100 the publication starts. Also if you have an object named '_DW_ProgressBar' in the root of the preloader it will be scaled horizontally to match the percentage loaded.
2. Tick the Disable Right-Click Menu option if you do not want the Adobe Flash Player context menu appear when the user right-clicks on the publication.
Note:
When the user right clicks on a movie playing in the Adobe Flash Player a context menu is normally displayed that allows the user to perform certain operations, including navigate through the movie. Moving through a movie published by Opus in this way will not work properly and could allow the user to see something, like the answers to a quiz, before they should. When the Disable Right-Click Menu option is selected the context menu only contains an entry for About Adobe Flash 5.
When the right-click menu is disabled in the standalone Adobe Flash Player, the main menu from the window is also hidden, which results in a black bar at the top and bottom of the publication.
3. Tick the Use external file for supported script option if you want to share the support script with other Opus Flex publications. If you tick this option, type the name you want to call the file.
Note:
Much of the file size for a publication is due to a special support script that must be included to make the publication behave like Opus is supposed to. By placing this support code into a separate SWF file (using the Use external file for support script option) it can be shared among a number of different published Flex files and thus only needs to be downloaded once. This is particularly useful for a website that uses many small publications because the file sizes will be significantly smaller if they all share one common support script.
This support script is a separate SWF file that will appear in the same directory as your published publication. You can specify a directory where the file will be placed e.g. ..\code\FlexCode.swf , however, the publish process will not place the file there. The code file be published to the normal directory and the publication will not work until you place the published file and the code file in the correct locations.
4. Preview versions of Flex preload just the first page of the publication, plus all the necessary actionscript code, before the publication would start. The Preload Extra % option allows you to specify that more of the publication be downloaded before it starts. A setting of 0% simply preloads just the first page and a setting of 100% downloads the whole publication before beginning. Note that the percentage is based on the number of bytes required by each page, not the number of pages.
Note:
The idea behind this setting can be explained as follows. Once the publication starts it still continues loading, but if you go to a page further into the publication it is possible to get a wait cursor until it is finished loading. This could be a problem if, for example, you had a publication that begins with a simple title page that displays for 5 seconds before automatically going to the next page, which contains a lot of graphics. In such a case you might get an annoying wait cursor. One way to avoid this would be to extend the delay on the first page, but it is more reliable to stay with the preloader for longer, and may look nicer if you have used a custom preloader.
5. Make your changes to the other tabs in the Publish Settings dialog, then click the OK button to close the dialog and return to the third page of the Publish Wizard to start publishing.