Update 5/5/2009: This is resolved in update 6.0.2. Original post follows.

My boss at work used Adobe InDesign CS4 to create a new, 20-page printed catalog for our customers. He discovered that InDesign has this nifty “Export to SWF” feature whereby, insto-presto, the same document can be converted into a snazzy Flash version, complete with super fancy page-turning effects. Neat!

Unfortunately, the file size of the generated Flash file is enormous–at 7.4 megabytes, it definitely wasn’t something that we could realistically put on our Web site.

Seems easy enough to fix! Let’s look at the options dialog that InDesign pops up during the export process:

Awesome! “JPEG Quality” sounds like just what we need, so let’s set it to “Minimum” and export the Flash–oh, wait, it’s the same size: 7.4 MB. Go back and set it to “Maximum”–7.4 MB. Set it to “Low”–7.4 MB.

Um.

A few wasted minutes of Googling gives us this gem on Adobe’s Forums from the purported Product Manager for InDesign:

First and foremost, unfortunately there is a bug in the JPEG Quality setting of the InDesign CS4 SWF Export dialog. The bug is that no matter what value you choose from the pop-up menu (Minimum, Low, Medium, High, Maximum), they will all end up as Medium quality. The bad news is that this bug was not discovered (internally) or reported (by pre-release and CS4 customers) before we shipped CS4 (6.0.0), or the 6.0.1 dot release. The good news is that it will be fixed in the next dot release (6.0.2). I can’t provide a specific date for the next dot release yet.

In other words, the feature Simply Does Not Work. This is the type of programming mistake that I make in our backend applications at a small business, sure: but it is not the type of mistake that you would expect from a multi-million dollar software development powerhouse who has been doing this for decades and charges over $600 for the product. Ridiculous.

Try exporting to a source file

Great. So the fix is not available, and I have to get this stupid Flash file up before I can go home. Maybe I can use the other InDesign option to export to XFL. Then we can open up this file in Adobe Flash proper and sort out the images there.

That works great, but when exporting to XFL, InDesign doesn’t export any of the hyperlinks or page animations, which is kind of half the point of the exporting feature. The Help manual even documents this as if this were useful behavior. Obviously InDesign had to generate some source file to generate the enormous SWF; why can’t I have that file, and not this half-baked XFL thing?

Now I’m getting irritated

Okay. Now what? Perhaps I can decompile the enormous SWF file so that I can access the image resources and lower the quality of the JPEGs. If you Google this long enough, you will find that generally all third-party Flash products (especially those relating to decompilation) fall into three categories:

• outdated open source software that probably never worked;
• poorly written shareware; and
• Trojan horses.

I finally downloaded a demo of Eltima’s Flash Decompiler Trillix. (What the hell does “Trillix” mean?) This application looks pretty, and it does let me see the image resources on the SWF and adjust their quality. But saving is disabled in the demo.

After roughly calculating out my hourly pay, I’d by that point determined that I had wasted much more of the company’s money than the $67 licensing fee, so I broke down and paid three tanks of gas for a magic license key number. I finally degraded the quality of all of the images and got the file size from 7.4 MB to 1.0 MB, which is good enough for us. Hopefully by the time the next catalog rolls around, Adobe will have released the 6.0.2 update.

The pièce de résistance

My boss asked me if I could use the new tool to just convert the SWF to a plain old FLA source file, the idea being that in the future we’d use this file as a template and bypass InDesign entirely.

Yep, you guessed it–the Eltiva software crashes with a bad pointer reference whenever it tries to decompile the scripts in the InDesign-generated Flash file. Why? Who knows–I don’t.

Conclusions and Delusions

This rant has some purpose: hopefully, it will help prevent some future poor sap from spending nearly half a day chasing his tale. The lessons learned: avoid the Export to SWF feature in Adobe InDesign CS4, and, if you must use it, use a decompiler to manually fix up the image resources.

This is why we drink.