SWFTools

Last updated
SWFTools
Developer(s) Matthias Kramm and others
Initial release2003;18 years ago (2003)
Stable release
0.9.2 Stable / April 8, 2012;9 years ago (2012-04-08)
Repository
Written in C
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Utility software - PDF SWF
License GPL-2.0-or-later
Website swftools.org

SWFTools is an open source software tool suite for creating and manipulating SWF files. Distributed under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later, it may be compiled from C source, to run under Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Apple OS X. [1] On Microsoft Windows systems, the pre-compiled installer also installs a GUI wrapper for the suite's PDF to SWF conversion tool, pdf2swf.

Contents

SWFTools relies upon, and links against, additional third-party libraries for some of its functionality, e.g. Xpdf, PDFlib, freetype, and libjpeg.

Tools

The current stable SWFTools suite, version 0.9.2, consists of the following components:

ComponentBrief Description
as3compileA standalone ActionScript 3.0 compiler.
avi2swfAVI animation files to SWF converter (now deprecated, use MEncoder or ffmpeg for this).
font2swfFont file (TTF, Type1) conversion to SWF.
gif2swfGIFs to SWF conversion. Able to handle animated gifs.
jpeg2swfGenerates a slideshow from one or more JPEG pictures. Supports motion estimation compression (h.263) for better compression of video sequences.
pdf2swfPDF to SWF Converter. Generates one frame per page. Enables fully formatted text, ::including tables and formulas, inside a SWF. It is based on the xpdf PDF parser from ::Derek B. Noonburg.
png2swfLike JPEG2SWF, only for PNGs.
swfbboxAllows reading, optimizing and readjusting SWF bounding boxes.
swfcSWF file creation from simple script files. Includes ActionScript 2.0/3.0 support.
swfcombineMulti-function tool for SWF insertion into Wrapper SWFs, SWF concatenation, stacking, and basic parameter manipulation (e.g. size change ).
swfdumpPrints out SWF information, i.e. images/fonts/sounds, contained code disassembly, cross-reference and bounding box data.
swfextractSWF element extraction: Movieclips, Sounds, Images, shapes, etc.
swfrenderBitmap rendering from swf files created with pdf2swf, jpeg2swf or png2swf.
swfstringsScans SWFs for text data.
wav2swfWAV audio to SWF conversion.

Extra and/or adapted commands are available in the development versions and the Git repository.

The SWFTools suite also includes a Python gFX API library, consisting of a PDF parser (based on xpdf) and a number of rendering back-ends. Using the API, one can extract text from PDF pages, create bitmaps from PDF, and convert PDF files to SWF. The latter functionality is similar to that offered by the standalone pdf2swf utility detailed above, but more powerful: the API can create individual SWF files from single PDF pages, or composite pages from different PDF files.

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References

  1. Bowen, Ronda (13 March 2011). "Top 5 Low-Budget and Free Flash Editors". Brighthub.com. Bright Hub Inc. Retrieved 7 February 2015.