Publishing and Exporting > About Generator and Flash

Generator extends the Flash authoring environment by letting designers work in Flash to build rich media content and deliver the final product in a variety of animated or static formats.

Any object created in Flash—including library elements, symbols, animations, Timelines, and publishing output—can be turned into a Generator object by using symbols and Generator variables. (Generator variables are text enclosed by curly brackets, for example, {text}.) Using Generator, you can choose the best visual display of information for your viewers—including scrolling lists, charts and graphs (basic, pie, stock, scatter), tables, a variety of different graphic formats, sound, and movies—to create real-time, custom multimedia Web experiences.

If you have Generator 2 installed, in Flash you can create templates that contain variable Generator elements (graphics, text, and sound) to be replaced with content provided by a data source (text files, databases, and so on). This generated content can be played back in the client's browser as a Flash Player movie, or as a JPEG, PNG, GIF, animated GIF, or QuickTime file.

In Flash, you can use Generator in the following ways:

	You can specify how a Flash movie interacts with Generator—including the default frame rate, frame size, and background color—in the Generator panel of the Publish Settings dialog box. See Publishing Generator templates.
	You can modify Flash HTML templates to work with Generator. See Customizing HTML publishing templates.
	You can update Generator name/value pairs using the Movie Explorer. Name/value pairs are variable names coupled with values, such as URL parameters. For more information on the Movie Explorer, see Using the Movie Explorer.

For more information on Generator, visit the Generator Web site or see your Generator 2 documentation.