About XFL format

For work, I often work with the xfl format; this is a new source file format for Adobe Flash. Information about what is xfl already wrote Habré . I would like to go deeper.

Below is the internal structure of the xfl file, the structure of xml files inside and about several difficulties that may arise when working with xfl files.



An XFL file can be opened with a regular winrar, as in fact it is a regular zip archive as well as gadgets for example. XFL can also be done with Adobe InDesign or manually))). Inside the XFL file there will be a trace. mimetype files, DOMDocument.xml, and the library folder.

1.

mimetype contains this line inside: application / vnd.adobe.xfl, to access xfl.

2.

DOMDocument.xml - this can be said our main scene, below what's inside:


    
        
    
    
        
    
    
        
            
                
                    
                        
                            
                                
                                    
                                        
                                    
                                
                            
                        
                    
                
            
        
    



* This source code was highlighted with Source Code Highlighter.

Whoever is familiar with flash immediately sees a familiar structure where first the page size is indicated
DOMDocument width="681" height="851"
further on xfl itself and we see that the file was created using Adobe InDesign CS4.

• Media indicates media files (image, music, video). In our case, we load the picture from the library folder, give it the name last page_back and specify the lossless compression.
• There will be one character in our library - movie clip page_1 and it will be described in the loaded xml file page_1.xml from library.
• Inside page_1.xml will have the same structure as the file described above.
• timelines - timeline
• DOMTimeline - scene selection
• layers - layers
• DOMLayer - the choice of the layer and the color of the layer that is used if only the drawing visibility is selected.
• frames - frames
• DOMFrame - frame number
• elements - elements placed on the scene
• DOMSymbolInstance - the name of the element placed on the scene
• transformationPoint - the point relative to which the transformation of the object occurs.

3.

The Library folder contains the downloadable files last page_back.png and Page_1.xml (movie clip in the library).

If you understand a little, then the file structure is quite understandable, but imagine that you have 1000 frames with 1000 objects on the scene, then manual editing will be very difficult.

Pitfalls XFL

You open the XFL file via flash, it immediately creates an empty document and adds the contents of the XFL file with the desired page size there, but the fonts that were used when creating the XFL file will not be displayed, but the ones you last used in flash will load. This in my opinion is a significant disadvantage of this format. This happens if the file is created in another editor, but mainly XFL and should serve as what the designer drew and saved specially for the person involved in animation or programming in flash.

But there are pluses. XFL files weigh less than Fla, for example, if you take a FLA file of 800 kb in size, then a similar XFL will be 631 kb. XFL, unlike FLA, can edit any one which is also a big plus. Most likely, XFL will be widely used in the near future, but we must not forget that this is still an archive and the original flash file remained FLA, because XFL simply cannot be unzipped to FLA and XFL cannot be compiled.