This tutorial offers procedures and strategies that allow you to adapt a Macromedia Flash MX movie to the language and culture of a target audience. Macromedia Flash MX supports localization through Unicode and the various ways in which you can include different languages in a movie. The tutorial includes the following topics:

	Using supported text encoding formats in the Macromedia Flash Player 6 and Macromedia Flash MX authoring tool
	Creating movies with multilanguage text by loading external text or XML files, using #include , or using text variables
	Using external text or XML files that are not Unicode encoded
	Adhering to a localization strategy
	Preparing and documenting your movie for localization
	Managing assets and content for localization
	Localizing a Macromedia Flash MX movie (sample files)

The sample files demonstrate how to load XML files, which contain English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Korean text, into a movie using XML.load .

If you're interested in just the topics on Unicode in the authoring tool and Macromedia Flash Player 6, which is presented in the first section of this thee-part article, you can also find that information in Unicode in Macromedia Flash MX.

Because this subject is too long to read easily in a browser, it is available as a downloadable file in Windows and Macintosh formats.

Download the Windows source files (476K)
Download the Macintosh source files (468K)

When the file decompresses, a folder named flashmxlocalization is created on your system. This folder contains eight files: flashxmlocalization.pdf (the PDF version of the tutorial); localization.fla; localization.swf; and five XML files

If you have trouble downloading or decompressing the files, see TechNote 13686.

Stephanie Gowin Stephanie Gowin is a senior instructional designer for Macromedia. Benjamin Salles Benjamin Salles is the Sr. Multimedia Designer for Macromedia. 20 August 2002 Flash MX, Flash Player 6, localization, Unicode, XML, multilanguage, multilingual, text, external files, character encoding, system.useCodepage, XML.load, languages, tutorial 9053