[Xerte] Editing products of templates?

[Tenney Julian]

Xerte uses swfmill only to compile the resources.swf if you want to
embed fonts or graphics. The main reason for using it is to embed fonts,
which allows a number of things that dynamic textfields can't do unless
the font is embedded (like rotate and scale smoothly), and also allows
you to use a custom font if you want to.

The XMLEngine.swf is precompiled and distributed with the application -
it reads the rlo file (which is an xml file) and creates the content
dynamically at runtime.

Xerte can edit and compile mxml files, using the flex sdk. This is very
much work in progress. If you download the flex sdk, and put the path to
the flex3sdk\bin folder in your windows path variable, reboot your
machine, you should then be able to compile mxml files into swfs, and
edit them using Xerte. There is a lot of work to do to make this work
really well - it was really just an experiment to see if I could hook up
the flex compiler (and in particular fcsh.exe) to Xerte, to allow flex
swfs to be created and built. Flex is a very rich framework, and I'm not
sure if typical xerte users / elearning developers would typically use
it in it's raw form - I think it more likely that a framework of simpler
to use classes built on the flex sdk would be more useful. If I go
further down this road, I'd probably look to build a framework of
classes similar to the existing icons in Xerte, and leave the hardcore
flex stuff to FlexBuilder (which is free to us here in academia).

It would lead to a Xerte 2.0 type application that would actually
compile swfs and use AS3.0. It would use the flex framework rather than
it's own engine, and so the differences between that and the current
Xerte would be significant - it would be hard to recreate the flowline
metaphor for example. A lot of work to do though, so view it as work in
progress.

J

-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of
jventola at verizon.net
Sent: 21 July 2008 19:53
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: RE: [Xerte] Editing products of templates?

Only that Xerte seems to use some other software in getting the job
done.
The "interesting" part is that I did not even know you could write Flash
directly; and while I had heard of Flex, I knew nothing of it, yet it
seems that xmlx has something to do with Flex.




Date sent:      	Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:59:32 +0100
From:           	"Tenney Julian" <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject:        	RE: [Xerte] Editing products of templates?
To:             	"Xerte discussion list"
<xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Send reply to:  	Xerte discussion list
<xerte at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>

> >Over the weekend I looked up xmlx and sawmill--Xerte has some
> intersting innards.
> 
> What do you mean??
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