Member Avatar for rhall

I know I have to take a screen capture of the page that was generated in Flash. But how then can I get that to a PDF format? I want a button on the Flash page that the user can click for all this to happen in the background.

Thanks for any help!

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Dani AI

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Quick reality check first: doing this entirely inside Flash was never safe or allowed, as noted. Flash could not capture the user’s screen or write files silently. Also, modern browsers removed Flash years ago, so the practical path today is: trigger a server to render the page and return a PDF. That aligns with ’s and ’s server-side advice, and clarifies that ’s virtual PDF printer idea only works on a desktop, not from a web page. ’s example downloads an existing PDF; it does not generate one.

A workable pattern:

  1. The button posts the URL or state your page needs to reproduce the view.
  2. The server loads that URL in a headless browser and streams a PDF back.

Example Node + Puppeteer route (short and production-friendly):

// GET /export-pdf?url=/reports/view?id=123
app.get('/export-pdf', async (req, res) => {
  const puppeteer = await import('puppeteer');
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ args: ['--no-sandbox'] });
  try {
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    const url = new URL(req.query.url, 'https://yourdomain.com').toString();
    await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: 'networkidle0', timeout: 60000 });
    await page.emulateMediaType('screen');
    const pdf = await page.pdf({ format: 'A4', printBackground: true });
    res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/pdf');
    res.setHeader('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename=page.pdf');
    res.end(pdf);
  } finally { await browser.close(); }
});

Tips:

  • Use a dedicated, print-stable route; pass any dynamic state in the query or session.
  • Add print CSS so the PDF matches the layout (hide UI chrome, set margins).
  • Make asset URLs absolute and publicly reachable; handle auth via tokens.
  • If you must keep legacy SWF visuals, render an HTML5 equivalent or emulator view, then export that. Client-only html2canvas+jsPDF can work in a pinch, but quality and CORS images are common pitfalls.

Recommended Answers

All 11 Replies

Member Avatar for Dani

This would have to be done via some server side script that created a pdf file on the fly.

What operating system would the server be? (Windows NT/2000, Linux, etc?) If you were using linux, for example, you'd need the flash program to automatically execute a script which would run a program on the server in the background which generated the image.

I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing this or how it would be done. I just know it seems pretty complicated ...

Member Avatar for Tekmaven

I'm an owner of Adobe Acrobat 5.0, and I swear my life by it. The way we create PDF files with Acrobat 5 is by printing to an Actobat Printer. In theory, you would need to create a little program that captures the screen and prints it to the PDF printer.

Member Avatar for samaru

What you're trying to do I think is impossible, within Flash anyways. If you're trying to automate this process, all from within Flash, and by that I mean, when you press a Flash button, it takes a screen shot and saves it as a PDF in the background. If this is the case, then Flash would need some system access, which it doesn't have for security reasons, and thank God for that. It would suck if I went to a Flash web site, while I had another window open with passwords, and this Flash web site took a screenshot of everything and processed it on the server.

What you're trying to do though, if I follow correctly, can be done with ActiveX. You'd have to code this control yourself. The browser would ask the user if it's safe to download the control. Once this is downloaded by the user, it can take the snapshot, send it back to the server, and you can use another process to convert to PDF. There are SDKs out there to convert images to PDFs on the fly.

Member Avatar for t.aarron

PDF generation is possible with PHP, I believe. What you need to do is redirect the user to a PHP form (with all of the information passed in a GET request) and have PHP generate a PDF file which it outputs for the user to download.

It cannot be done with ActionScript alone -- you will require some form of server-side programming language.

Torres Aarron

Edited by Ezzaral because: Snipped "fake sig" link. Please restrict such links to your site-wide user signature, which can be edited from the user control panel.
Member Avatar for Amit Adav

PDF FILE INTO FLASH CODE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

on (press) {

        import flash.net.FileReference;

        var listener:Object = new Object();

        

        listener.onSelect = function(file:FileReference):Void {

                trace("onSelect: " + file.name);

        }

        

        listener.onCancel = function(file:FileReference):Void {

                trace("onCancel");

        }

        

        listener.onOpen = function(file:FileReference):Void {

                trace("onOpen: " + file.name);

        }

        

        listener.onProgress = function(file:FileReference, bytesLoaded:Number,

 bytesTotal:Number):Void {

                trace("onProgress with bytesLoaded: " + bytesLoaded 

+ " bytesTotal: " + bytesTotal);

        }

        

        listener.onComplete = function(file:FileReference):Void {

                trace("onComplete: " + file.name);

        }

        

        listener.onIOError = function(file:FileReference):Void {

                trace("onIOError: " + file.name);

        }

        

        var fileRef:FileReference = new FileReference();

        fileRef.addListener(listener);

        var url:String = "resume.pdf";

        if(!fileRef.download(url, "resume.pdf")) {

                trace("dialog box failed to open.");

        }

}
Edited by Ezzaral because: Added code tags. Please use them to format any code that you post.
Member Avatar for matricol

it does not work for me .. what did I did wrong?

Member Avatar for pgmco

There are many companies who will do this pretty cheap.

Member Avatar for AffineMesh

I know I have to take a screen capture of the page that was generated in Flash. But how then can I get that to a PDF format? I want a button on the Flash page that the user can click for all this to happen in the background.
Thanks for any help!

You could try something like this...

Make the button on your Flash movie call a server-side script with the getURL function. The script will need to know what page is to be rendered. Don't rely on the HTTP Referer header as this is not always reliable. Instead, pass the document location encoded in the query string...

on(release) {
  getURL("http://www.yoursite.com/my-script.aspx?referrer=my-flash-page.htm","_self");
}

Your server-side script, written in ASP.NET or PHP, can then access the query string. Decode the referring URL and and pass it on to a PDF component / library for further processing.

The following code is written in C# and uses the ABCpdf component from WebSupergoo (mentioned earlier by rajarajan07):

string theUrl = "" + yourDecodedUrlQueryString
Doc theDoc = new Doc();
theDoc.AddImageUrl(theUrl);
theDoc.Save("output.pdf");
theDoc.Clear();

Optionally, you can stream the PDF back to your client's browser or send it as an inline attachment. To do this, simply replace the call to Doc.Save() with something like this:

byte[] theData = theDoc.GetData();
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
Response.AddHeader("content-length", theData.Length.ToString());
if (Request.QueryString["attachment"] != null)
  Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=ExampleSite.pdf");
else
 Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "inline; filename=ExampleSite.pdf");
Response.BinaryWrite(theData);
Response.End();

Sometimes it's necessary to control which frame of a Flash movie is captured, such as when Flash movies fade in. See the HTMLOptions.AddMovie property for details on how to do this.

If you need to import Flash movies that aren't embedded in an HTML document, there's some example code to be found in the documentation for the SwfImportOperation.Import function...

Edited by AffineMesh because: n/a
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