Aral Balkan

As someone who was drooling over the first FlashPaper (ok, I don't really drool -- at least, I won't admit to it in public), I was floored by the quality and usability of FlashPaper 2. Kudos to the team at Macromedia for turning out such a fine product. In fact, I am very impressed by Contribute 3 in general.

I got the chance to use FlashPaper on the e-brochures for the training courses I will be teaching at the end of this month (Introduction to ActionScript 2 and Best Practices Flash and Flex Development) and was impressed by (1) how easy it is to use (just print!), (2) the quality of the end-result and (3) the PDF output option.

In both cases, the quality of the resulting FlashPaper document was clearly superior to that of the generated PDF. To skew things further in FlashPaper's favor, the FlashPaper versions were also considerably smaller than the resulting PDFs. You can compare the quality and file size of both versions below:

FlashPaper (620kb) vs. PDF (865kb)

FlashPaper (591kb) vs. PDF (836kb)

Comments

• My only gripe is right clicking doesn't have a copy option in the context menu... wtf? Even if they made a custom text object, you could easily add "copy" to the right click context menu, and add the system . shove in clipboard method.
  
  The speed at which FlashPaper2 converts documents, the speed at which it opens said SWF's, and the (usually) way lower smaller filesize does indeed make it a neat product.

  by JesterXL on 2005-01-02 13:02:19

• Hmm, you're right Jesse, I never noticed that. But it *does* allow you to copy text using Ctrl-C (on Windows.)
  
  Perhaps it was an oversight or perhaps they thought that people use the keyboard short-cut more than the context menu option for copy/paste? It would be neat to have though.

  by Aral Balkan on 2005-01-02 13:05:42

• Yeah, CTRL + C works, but I figure most people would either view it or print it; not utilize the text from it somewhere else. I've been using it for wireframes from work since it shouldn't take 10 years just to view a wireframe. "Is the PDF done booting, yet?"

  by JesterXL on 2005-01-02 16:52:40

• Hi, - I used flashpaper some years ago, - and now I find myself in a situation where it could come in handy,- if... is it possible to make flashpaper 2 'read' html formattet text from an xml file? Greetings Godowsky

  by Godowsky on 2007-07-24 07:28:26