SWF – short for “Small Web Format” or “Shockwave Flash”, is a kind of popular format intended to be small enough to publish various animations or applets on the web.

SWF has come under the control of Adobe and can be generated from within several Adobe products: Flash, Flex Builder (an IDE), as well as through MXML.

Early SWF format was praised because it created compact animations that were fast loading. Now, SWF files can incorporate sound and video and even bitmap files.

Major Advantages of SWF Format

1. SWF is vector based. This means that the graphics can be scaled easily, so they can be zoomed in or be fit onto different size screens, and the file will still look very clear and play very smooth (unlike bitmap animation).

2. SWF is fast loading. It was intentioanlly created small and light to display entertaining animations and could be reused by a player running on any system and which would work with slower network connections.

3. Easy and smooth compression. Like PNG format, SWF uses a non-patented lossless data compression method known as DEFLATE, which is the same algorithm used in the zlib compression library.

4. Supports transparencies (like PNG and GIF). SWF offers a variety of transparency options. With truecolor and greyscale images either a single pixel value can be declared as transparent or an alpha channel can be added (enabling any percentage of partial transparency to be used).

Major Disadvantages of SWF Format

With all the formats though come their disadvantages however, there are not many with SWF but a major one is compatibility. One can not play an SWF video unless it has Macromedia Flash installed on the computer.

Some Tips about SWF

Grab online SWF files for free and with ease.

Convert SWF files to pupolar video formats for playback on various portable devices.

You May also Want to Know

How to convert Word Files into Web-Ready SWF Documents or PDFs

How to Convert Flash(SWF) to MP4 for Playback on iPod

Let’s say if you want to publish Microsoft Word documents on the Internet for sharing with other people, usually we will save it as web page format .mht or .mhtml, however, the layout will be changed if we use this way. Is there any better solution to convert Word to web-ready documents like flash SWF without changing its layout? Definitely yes, FlashPaper is the key!

FlashPaper allows anyone to convert printable files(here we use Microsoft Word for example) into Flash documents or Adobe PDF files with one click. Instantly generate Flash documents that can be accessed by over half a billion web users. Or transform files into secure, compact PDFs for e-mailing, archiving, and printing. FlashPaper is an affordable solution to create web-ready documents easily that can be shared on any website.

The brief tutorial below demonstrates exactly how to convert Word to Flash SWF with FlashPaper in seconds:

Step 1: Simply download and install FlashPaper program. The free trial versiom is available at Adobe official website.

Step 2: Open one Word document that you want to convert to flash, click “FlashPaper” menu on Toolbar.

Step 3: Click “Convert to Macromedia Flash(.swf)”, and then save it in the destination folder.

Step 4: Open the SWF file you just saved in the destination folder, you will be amazed how excellent job the FlashPaper has done: layout is exactly the same and everything is the same. By the way, FlashPaper can also convert Word to PDF. Try it!

Kind notice:

Want to be more creative? No problem, try to convert those generated SWF files to other popular video formats like AVI, MP4, VOB. MPG, RMVB, etc with Moyea SWF to Video Converter Std/Pro, so that you can watch them via various portable devices, iPod, iPhone for example. Have fun!