Add layer on top of existing SWF in Flash Pro

Question

A project I'm involved in has a specific requirement where a layer must be added on top of an existing SWF. The SWF is created by converting a PDF using SWFTools pdf2swf. This layer will be used to add interactive elements like videos or sound on top of the existing text content in the SWF.

My problem is, when I try to import the SWF into Flash Pro, it sort of breaks up and it's not possible to see the SWF or its elements correctly.

I've tried making the SWF a MovieClip symbol after importing and called its play() and gotoAndPlay(i) methods to no avail. Using an external SWF with a loader works, but the SWF should be internal so the whole project can be compiled to iOS and Android in one go.

Are there any other methods I could use to interact with a SWF and make it work inside my FLA project?

Answer 1

Your problem is not in Flash but the way you're transforming the pdf to swf. The default parameters of pdf2swf will export the swf for a previous version of Flash, 6 to be exact. So you need to explicitly set the flash version when converting to a later version so that you can import it in your timeline (assuming u're using AS3).

Use this config option: -T , --flashversion num Set Flash Version in the SWF header to num.

View this for more information: http://wiki.swftools.org/index.php?title=Pdf2swf http://wiki.swftools.org/index.php?title=Pdf2swf_-s_parameters