About scaling

A print job using the PrintJob class prints Flash content, by default, without scaling it. For example, an object that is 144 pixels wide on screen will print as 144 points, or 2 inches wide (One point equals one pixel. In the authoring tool, 72 pixels equals one inch; on paper, 72 points equals one inch.)

To understand how Flash screen content maps to the printed page, it helps to understand screen and print units of measure. Pixels are a screen measurement and points are a print measurement. Both pixels and points equal 1/72 of an inch. A twip is 1/20 of a point and pixel.

The following list further illustrates the relationship between units of measure.

• 1 pixel = 20 twips
• 1 point = 20 twips
• 72 pixels = 1 inch
• 72 points = 1 inch
• 567 twips = 1 cm
• 1440 twips = 1 inch

To scale a movie clip before printing, set its MovieClip.xscale and MovieClip.yscale properties before calling this method, then set them back to their original values afterward. If you scale a movie clip and also pass a value for the printArea property, the pixel values passed to printArea reflect the original size of the movie clip. That is, if you set a movie clip's scale to 50% and specify a print area of 500 x 500 pixels, the content that prints is identical to the content that would print if you didn't scale the movie clip; however, it prints at half the size. For more information, see PrintJob.addPage().

Specifying printing as a vector image or bitmap graphic

The options parameter lets you specify whether to print as a vector graphic or bitmap image. When using this optional parameter, use the following syntax:

{printAsBitmap:boolean}

The default value is false, which represents a request for vector printing. Keep in mind the following suggestions when determining which value to use:

• If the content that you're printing includes a bitmap image, then specify that the print job print as a bitmap to include any transparency and color effects.
• Conversely, if the content does not include bitmap images, then specify that the print job print as vector graphics to take advantage of the higher image quality.

Specifying a frame to print

The frameNum parameter lets you specify a frame to print. If you do not specify a frame number parameter, the current frame of the target or level specified as the first parameter when adding a page prints by default.