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Flash CS3: The Missing Manual
book

Flash CS3: The Missing Manual

by E. A. Vander Veer, Chris Grover
May 2007
Beginner content levelBeginner
530 pages
16h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Flash CS3: The Missing Manual

Panels

A Flash panel is like a toolbar on steroids: bigger and loaded down with more options, but built for the same reason—to let you keep the stuff you work with the most visible, right there in front of you, where it's easy for you to find and use. Furthermore, unlike toolbars, panels offer options you can't find on any menu.

To conserve space on Flash's jam-packed interface, only one toolbar—the Edit Bar toolbar—appears automatically. It's positioned directly above the stage. To display the other two, select Window → Toolbars → Main (to display the Main toolbar) and Window →Toolbars → Controller (to display the Controller window). The checkmarks on the menu show when a toolbar is turned on. Choose the toolbar's name again to remove the checkmark and hide the toolbar.

Figure 1-5. To conserve space on Flash's jam-packed interface, only one toolbar—the Edit Bar toolbar—appears automatically. It's positioned directly above the stage. To display the other two, select Window → Toolbars → Main (to display the Main toolbar) and Window →Toolbars → Controller (to display the Controller window). The checkmarks on the menu show when a toolbar is turned on. Choose the toolbar's name again to remove the checkmark and hide the toolbar.

Flash offers you a ton of panels, each of which appears initially in one of two flavors: docked or floating. Docked panels appear outside your workspace, like the Align, Transform, and Info panels shown in Figure 1-6.

You can have as few or as many panels showing at a time as you like. The Window menu lists all of Flash's panels, and you show and hide them by selecting to turn their checkmarks on and off—exactly as with toolbars.

Panels like the ones shown here group useful options together, so you can find what you want quickly and easily. If all you see is a tab, the panel is collapsed and hiding its tools. To expand a collapsed panel and reveal its options, click the bar at the top. To collapse a panel, another click will do the trick. Click the double arrows to collapse all the panels so they take up less horizontal space. To remove a panel, click the X button.

Figure 1-6. Panels like the ones shown here group useful options together, so you ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596510442Supplemental ContentErrata Page