document

struct swf_doaction {
	swf_tag			f_tag;		/* 12 and 59 */
	if(f_tag == DoInitAction) {
		unsigned short	f_action_sprite;
	}
	swf_action		f_action_record[variable];
};

The DoAction tag will be used to execute a set of actions in place. Usually, actions are used on buttons to add interactivity to the SWF movies. In version 1 you had only one dynamic branch (WaitForFrame). In version 4 you can test many different things such as a position, angle or sound track cursor position. Since version 5, SWF has a complete scripting language supporting string and arithmetic operations.

This documents makes use of structure definitions that very much look like C structures. It is important to note that this is not all that true since the data saved in a SWF file are very specific and they don't follow the default, inflexible (as in static,) C definitions.

The following pages define the basic types used in this document. The comments explain in more details how each type is used.

Note that except for bit fields, all types start on a byte boundary. Nothing will be aligned on more than one byte.

Brief History

At the very beginning, a company created the SWF format to generate small vector animations on the Internet called Shockwave Flash (hence the name of the format, SWF.) It also included images. This company was bought by Macromedia around 1997 (if I recall properly). This is when Flash v3 was created. Since then, Macromedia created a new version about once a year up to version 8. At that time (in 2005/2006), Macromedia sealed a deal with Adobe which wanted to use the SWF format in their PDF files.

Today (May 1st, 2008), the SWF format is available for free to all.

There was ...

SSWF™ name

The name SSWF™ is used by Made to Order Software to reference its SWF library. You are welcome to use this name in reference the SSWF library if you use it in your own software.

SWF Format

Please, note that there is no restriction in using this document. However, the SWF format copyright holders are Macromedia and Adobe. There may be limits in what you can do using this format. If you are not sure, I suggest you contact a knowledgeable copyright and Software attorney who can help you decide what you can do with the SWF format.

This document was written by Alexis Wilke. Different people have helped in fixing mistakes in the different structures defined here. Their names appear in the Appendix B — History of the SSWF reference.

The Flash File Format Explained

The SWF file format is used for Flash. SWF stands for Shockwave Format1, the very first company that created the Flash animation format later bought by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe.

The following book is an attempt in describing the binary file ...

• 1. There are many people who found other names for the acronym such as Shockwave Flash, Shock Wave File, Small Web Format, Serious Wow Factor, and SWIFF. History of man kind is confronted with the same problems, unfortunately. And no... it really has nothing to do with the Swiss Wrestling Federation!

Making a great thing even better!

		SSWF Support

Since it's initial release in 2002, SSWF has been extremely popular. Despite never being advertised, it has been downloaded more than 77,250 times just on SourceForge.net, has been converted to work on several Unix platforms not initially ...

Have you ever thought that it would be great to write one document including all the translations in a single file? Outside of the fact that this makes the document relatively large, it makes the translation really fast, the translator can see the sentence in all the other languages and translate from that.

I actually wrote an HTML test file with two styles. One is named English and the other is named Français. And since a style entry can depend on the currently selected language, you can write style entries that get hidden when on or the other language is selected.

So, if you ...

Today I had to debug a set of HTML pages. One feature of a website would not work with Internet Explorer. The code was like this: