Oscar Trelles

Flash Paper Hack

I haven’t seen this posted anywhere, so I thought I would share this tip with you, although I don’t know how many of you use Flash Paper at all.

Anyway, here is the thing. Flash Paper is the coolest to show printable materials in-line, embedded in a web document. However you can’t quite predict the zooming factor of the piece, unless you pass along an specific value. So, what I discovered is that a SWF generated with the Flash Paper printer driver actually expects data for the initial scale in the variable INITIAL_VIEW_MODE, and defaults to whatever it calculates appropriate for presentation if undefined.

So, if you add this to inside your object tag:

<param name="FlashVars" value="INITIAL_VIEW_MODE=100" />

your document will be always loaded at 100% scale, regardless of the pixel size of the SWF embedded in your web page. This is particularly useful if you are using relative measurements.