🚀 go-pugleaf

And you want to do that by scripting ?
Paper is opaque by nature. A transparent frame is "filled" with None or a swatch with 0% opacity. But you already know this.
Did you make any search in the help or in google ?
Loic

I agree that paper is opaque by nature :-), but it's not unusual in the printing industry to print on transparent materials, so I think there must/should be a way to do this.

Chris.

Telling InDesign you will print on a transparency sheet will not make the screen transparent.

InDesign itself sets nothing as 'background', so if you print on paper, you get a white background ... and on a transparency sheet, you will get /no/ background.

What Loic was pointing out is that the background appears to be a function of the SWF export, and you cannot change it by scripting.

Thanks for pointing this out. I really thought the paper swatch/color was used as background for the swf export, but I did some tests and it isn't.

So, why is the background always white when exporting to swf?

      I did some tests and it isn't.




That was smart thinking. So it is NOT the [Paper] swatch colour -- not exactly what I was expecting.

      So, why is the background always white when exporting to swf?




Why indeed.

Ask me why the sky is blue and I can tell you.

Black? [Paper] means absence of ink; since SWF is only viewed on a 
screen, it could be that the equivalent to transparent would be 
absence of light, i.e. Black. Just a thought.
-- 
Noel 

So, why is the background always white when exporting to swf?

Hi,
I think that Indesign ability to export as swf has more to be considered as a cool tool, useful once in a while, than a real productive tool.
Indesign is probably not a multimedia creation software as Flash.

Once that said, you may try to import this exported swf into flash if you have this soft. You have to create a new document and place the swf in the scene.
There is chance that you get all the elements rasters and vectors. Hence, you will be able to set the background as transparent I guess.
certainly much more cumfortabily.

Loic

PS: At last, you my request this improvement in Indesign new versions. Adobe offers a page for that kind of wishes.

but it's not unusual in the printing industry to print on transparent materials

You are right but in this case, a "paper" background is a mental concept. In indesign, it simulates the render of the medium. It's not a ink.
You can have a "paper" background set to blue. It won't mean you will export blue datas but it helps the designer to make his layout based on the colored paper onto which it will be printed.
"Paper" looks white because most of the time, jobs are printed onto white paper. But once again, this is not a real data but a help.
You can have a white paper background but when you will print on a transparent media, there won't be any white ink on it.

Loic,

I totally follow your reasoning about paper color and ink ...

Concerning the SWF, I'm not scripting against InDesign, but programming (in Java) against InDesign Server. I already posted my question on the InDesign Server forum a couple of weeks ago, but without response.

It is pretty important for the tool I'm making that the SWF background is transparent since our Flex client will have to put different SWFs on top of each other thereby taking transparancy into account.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. I will contact Adobe and post a feature/improvement request.