If you know Peter Hall's blog or have visited Helen Triolos site recently you'll have noticed that they have created some classes and experiments based on the new export functions that Burak's Actionscript Viewer offers: the ability to export shapes from within swf files into an Actionscript readable format. The great thing is that you can create complex shapes or logos within the authoring environment and then apply scripted effects or transformations to them.
Now as I was exploring the inner workings of the swf format a while ago I created quasi as a by-product a tool that dumps the content of swf files. This weekend I finally had the time to reduce this to something that dumps only the contained shape informations of swf files into useful formats. My AS Shape Decoder can produce either a set of moveTo/lineTo/curveTo commands or it creates the same format as ASV which is more compact and allows you to use the ASVDrawing Class that Peter wrote. AS Shape Decoder v0.5 does not output gradients and bitmap fills correctly yet, so you should avoid them at the moment.
Posted at July 07, 2003 12:51 AM | Further reading
