Publishing > Publishing overview |  |

Publishing overview

When you're ready to deliver your movie to an audience, you can publish the Macromedia Flash MX document (FLA file) for playback. By default, the Publish command creates the Flash SWF file and an HTML document that inserts your Flash movie in a browser window.

When you export a Flash movie file in Flash MX format, text is encoded in Unicode format, providing support for international character sets, including double-byte fonts. Likewise, your Flash Player 6 supports Unicode encoding. See Unicode text encoding in Flash movies.

You can also publish the FLA file in alternative file formats—GIF, JPEG, PNG, and QuickTime—with the HTML needed to display them in the browser window. Alternative formats enable a browser to display your movie's animation and interactivity for users who don't have the Flash Player 6 installed. When you publish a FLA file in alternative file formats, the settings for each file format are stored with the FLA file.

You can export the FLA file in a variety of formats as well. Exporting FLA files is similar to publishing FLA files in alternative file formats, except that the settings for each file format are not stored with the FLA file. See Exporting.

As an alternative to using the Publish command, if you're proficient in HTML, you can create your own HTML document with any HTML editor and include the tags required to display a Flash movie. See Configuring a Web server for Flash.

Before you publish your movie, it's important to test how the movie works using the Test Movie and Test Scene commands. For more information, see Testing movie download performance.