Movie in a table cell won't work

[sonjamcshane]

When I insert an SWF movie into a table cell in Flare4 (Insert > Picture), it does not run in the built output. It runs fine when inserted outside of a table.
I don’t want to insert the movie into the topic using a link, because I want the movie to be next to the cell to the right of its related text.
Is movies not working in cells a known bug, or is there some way to make it work?

Thanks, Sonja

[LTinker68]

You might need to set the size of the cell to the dimensions of the movie, instead of letting it dynamically try to size to the movie, since the table is probably rendered before the movie has passed its dimensions along for the correct window size to be displayed.

[sonjamcshane]

I resized the cell width, but how do you resize the height? For the time being I just put lots of carraige returns in the cell to the left of the one containing the movie. Still no movie appearing in the built output. Should I resize the height another way?
Thanks,
Sonja

[LTinker68]

You might want to create a custom <td> class. You can specify the height and width for that class, then apply that class just to that cell.

[sonjamcshane]

Thanks for the tip. Here's what I've now tried:

In the Styles.css I created a td_movie_cell class. In the Positioning property I set:
'height' to 515
'width' to 1010 (Both are a few points bigger than the movie.)
'visibility; to visible.

I also set the Cell property 'width' to 1010 px.

I then selected the cell and applied the style, and then built the project. The movie still doesn't run.

Next I resized the tr and column by using the spans and blocks, but still no go.

I thought I might be able to do something with a TableStyles.css, so I added one to the project (it didn't have one). But I can't set height and width that way.

Any ideas on what else can I try (bar redesigning my tutorial layout to put the movie under the table instead of inside it)?

Thanks?

[GregStenhouse]

Being a Friday afternoon I thought I'd have a play and see what I could find. Looks like you are correct, when you insert a swf movie in a table, it doesn't appear. The exact same movie works fine outside the table.

So I had a look at the code that it is generating in the preview. I noticed the "<embed ... width ... height" tag is different between the two. Outside the table, the code is "<embed width="796" height="568" ". Inside the table, the code is "<embed width="0" height="0" ", which looks like it the reason the movie is not playing.

To fix this, right click the swf movie in the xml editor, and select Object. The first screen of the dialog should be Size, and there you can set a custom size.

For me, manually setting the movie in the table to Width, Length: 796 and Height, Length: 568 did the trick. Hopefully it works for you as well.

I also suggest raising a bug report, Flare should automatically get the sizing right for SWF files in tables, having to manually set the size is a bit of a kludge.

Cheers
Greg

[sonjamcshane]

Thanks Greg, I'll try that now. (I got a surprise getting a reply from someone in this time zone! )
Sonja

[sonjamcshane]

Brilliant! It works perfectly when I preview the compiled topic.

But two steps forward, one step back I'm afraid; it doesn't work when I build the project. The movie outside the cell does. Any ideas on that one?

Thanks, sonja

[GregStenhouse]

It looks like the Object>Size option is adding code to the actual <Object> tag:
<Object ... width=" " height=" " ... >
While leaving the <embed ... > tag as
<embed width="0" height="0" ... >

The implications, as far as I can tell are:
IE seems to read the <Object > size and ignore the <embed> size, so all appears well in that browser, and the preview window. HTML help is also OK.
Firefox seems to read the <embed> size over the <object> size, so the movie does not appear in the output (e.g. when viewing Webhelp in FIrefox)

IMHO definitely a bug worth reporting.

As for a workaround, maybe you could work with positioning and padding (outside a table) to get the desired result. For example, right click the movie and select Object. Amongst the tabs you can choose Position: Right, and add some padding to the left. That should give you a paragraph to the left of the movie to add some text.

[sonjamcshane]

Greg, thanks so much for all your help. The project was suddenly put on hold, and has now moved to another person. I'm sure if they run into more problems we'll be back here.
Thanks again,
Sonja

[NorthEast]

This seems to be fixed now in the v4.1 update.