best practices for launching pages

[montana321]

Trying to wrap my head about how to go about launching pages from a technical manual in Animate.

There'd be a button.  You click on that button and within animate a frame would come up showing that content.

The content would be a section produced in Framemaker or InDesign and might include illustrations or tables and while I'd try to keep it tight, could be up to a couple pages long.

Between the Framemaker and InDesign there're many different formats to choose from to export in. HTML, PDF, XML, etc.

Wasn't sure which route to go, or how to go about it.  For example do you swap the content in and out of animate, calling it from an accompanying directory of xml or html files?

I'm sure this is a common practice, people must be doing what I'm describing all the time, but was having a hard time finding resources that would step through the process.

[kglad]

you should publish a bitmap.  if you can't publish a bitmap, publish anything else and take a screenshot of it and then crop it to size in photoshop so you end up with a bitmap that will be a 'page' in animate.

import that bitmap to a movieclip frame in animate.  you can add more frames to that movieclip and bitmaps to frames and you can add more movieclips depending on how you want to organize your project.  you can use your button to navigate from frame to frame and/or add/remove movieclips from the stage.

p.s. i wouldn't necessarily call this a best practice.  it's just one way to do things for someone more familiar with framemaker and indesign than they are with animate.

[montana321]

Okay, thanks.  Hadn't thought of that.

For this project there might be a pretty good volume of pages involved.  Not sure right now becasue I'm trying to cutail it, but am thinking could be up to a hundred.  Would having all these pages loaded into the project be burdensome on performance?

Similiar to your method, anotherr approach would be to copy and paste the information into Animate.  Could keep it in the original vector art, which might be advantagous.  Had gotten hung up on loading in html pages of xml files (which I know amazingly little about) that hadn't thought of this until you mentioned the cut and paste. 

[kglad · Accepted solution]

that will have no impact on performance in your situation, but it will affect file size.

[montana321]

thanks kglad!

[kglad]

you're welcome.

[ClayUUID]

kglad  wrote

that will have no impact on performance in your situation, but it will affect file size.

Specifically load time. A hundred or so pages in the library could easily lead to some brutal preload delays.

[montana321]

With that in mind, would you load and unload them into movie clips as needed?

[ClayUUID]

Probably. If you float an iframe over your Animate stage you could dynamically load anything into it.

[kglad]

animate will do that automatically for you if you're publishing and using a swf:  if no bitmap appears until the main timeline reaches frame 2, frame 1 will load very rapidly.

if frame 2 contains 1 bitmap only, only that bitmap needs to load before frame 2 can display etc.

[montana321]

Was using html canvas (versus flash swf).  Should probably have mentioned that.

[kglad]

there are ways to sequentially load html5 but animate doesn't do that for you automatically.

[montana321]

alright.

Thanks again, guys.

I'll throw together a project, and see how bad it blogs.  If there's issues, than I'll look into the sequential thing you're talking about.

[montana321]

Kglad,

Built a test project based on the bitmap approach you suggested.  Also experimented around with svg files, but decided that they were too big so went back to the bitmap.

In my travels, I also built one test that fired up pop up browser windows of manual sections, which had been exported as html5 responsive files, using:

this.But52.addEventListener("click", fl_MouseClickHandler_5.bind(this));

function fl_MouseClickHandler_5()
{
  window.open("52/Responsive HTML5/index.html", "_blank", "top=100", "height=200,width=800");
}

So I have my main diagnostics test folder, inside of which would be main html file, and inside of that main folder there'd be a series of individual folders for each section.

While I'm still working through some bugs this other approach seems to be working, though only on my test machine.