How It Works
Flash Player includes a built-in printer driver that can convert graphical information from a .swf file and send it directly to the computer's printing system. This is useful for creating printable pamphlets, posters, data sheets, tests, and other material suited to paper format. Flash is a superior Web printing format because its vector graphics can scale to accommodate the highest resolution that your printer is capable of (see Figure 8).
Figure 8 Flash can print high quality images, and it can even print content from dynamic text fields.
A standard monitor can reproduce only 72 dots per inch; even an inexpensive inkjet printer can produce at least 300 dots per inch. Regular Web site bitmapped graphics will stretch and become pixelated at these higher resolutions, and a printed Web page can reflect on paper only what appears in the browser. A Flash Player movie, however, can have separate content for display and printing, making this a fantastic way to deliver paper-based material to viewers on the Web without using Acrobat and PDF files. Another advantage of Flash Player printing is that content can be personalized to the user with the use of dynamic text fields and even Macromedia Generator.