One of the most long-awaited upgrades to Adobe^R Creative^R Suite is the improvements to the integration between Illustrator^R and Flash^R. Many Flash designers prefer to create the graphics for their Flash projects in Illustrator. Now, with the new release of CS3, you have more options when moving your Illustrator files into Flash. You can import your Illustrator files into Flash as well as copy/paste and drag/drop. In all three methods, you will be able to transfer the Illustrator paths, anchor point positions, gradients, clipping masks, symbols, layers, groups and object names along with the graphic. How is this possible? When you create text or a symbol in Illustrator that will be used in Flash, you will use two special panels. These panels allow you to add Flash information to your Illustrator graphics.

With the Flash Text panel in Illustrator, you can set the text Type to Static, Dynamic or Input. Then when the text is moved into Flash, it will be ready to be used on the Flash Timeline or programmed with ActionScript.

With the Symbols panel and Symbol Options dialog box in Illustrator, you can create a symbol to be used in Flash. As you can see, the Symbol Options dialog box in Illustrator is very similar to the Convert to Symbol dialog box in Flash. Therefore, while still in Illustrator, you can give the new symbol a name and set the symbol Type to one of the three Flash symbol types; Movie Clip, Button or Graphic. You can also set the Registration Location Point for Flash and enable 9-Slice Scaling.

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