If you want to get your gradients into Flash see the bonus tip below. It will ignore gradients, tints, patterns and fancy stuff like that. Rather than converting the CMYK with my own function, I used the applications themselves to convert the colors to RGB for Flash, so the transfer fidelity is quite good. This extension will transfer spot and process colors of all varieties (RGB, CMYK, LAB, HSB). Version 1.1.0 of this extension will send the Illustrator or InDesign swatches right to your swatches panel in Flash.

UPDATE (12/7/08): If you have Flash CS4, you can skip the step above. You can then use the eyedropper to pick up the colors, or you can add them to your swatches panel individually (similar to this demo of the Kuler panel). This extension takes the swatches from your current InDesign or Illustrator document and sends them to a new layer on the Flash stage. So, I decided to plow ahead and see what I could come up with. I’ve certainly spent my fair share of time opening up the swatch properties, making sure the swatch is RGB or hex and copying all three fields one at a time. There does seem to be a lot usefulness to such an extension, since XFL creates a new workflow between InDesign and Flash, and the Illustrator importer for Flash is fantastic, but neither one loads any of the swatches from the original document. If you have Flash CS4, the swatches will now go right into your Flash Swatches panel. Be on the lookout for an update in the next few days.

I have a few test cases working and I’m confident that I can add it to this extension, so the swatches will go right in the Flash swatches panel, rather than onto the stage, though it will only work in CS4. The feature is undocumented for a reason: it sends encoded XML data, and if the data is faulty, it crashes Flash. After some decompiling and a lot of detective work, I found an undocumented JSFL call that was added to CS4.

Second, JSFL (the Flash scripting language) doesn’t have any access (currently) to the swatches panel.īREAKING NEWS (12/6/08): I noticed that the new Kuler extension for Flash CS4 has an “add to swatches” button, and it actually adds swatches to the swatches panel. First, finding a way for extendscript or JSFL to read the contents of an ASE file (which is not open source and not plaintext) proves to be quite difficult. There are several stumbling blocks in the way of such an extension. Following the merge text extensions for Flash, Illustrator, and InDesign, Keith Gilbert wrote me wondering about getting swatch information from InDesign to Flash via XFL or by way of importing an Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) file into the Flash swatches panel.

Find scripts panel adobe indesign cs4