MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX 2004-USING DIRECTOR, Use Manual, Page: 46 / 500

46 Chapter 2: Score, Stage, and Cast
Launching external editors
You can specify external applications to edit many types of media. All the types of media for
which you can define an external editor are listed in the Editors Preferences dialog box. After you
set up an external editor for a particular media type, Director starts the application when you edit
a cast member of that type. When you finish editing a cast member in an external editor and then
save and close the file, Director re-imports the cast member media.
You can easily edit Flash cast members using the launch-end-edit feature in Director MX. For
more information, see
“Editing a Flash cast member” on page 184 .
If you want to use an external editor for an imported cast member, select Include Original Data
for External Editing during import. For more information, see
“Importing cast members”
on page 42 .
You cannot define an external editor for any cast member created by an Xtra, such as text, vector
shapes, and custom pointers.
To define an external editor:
1
Select Edit > Preferences > Editors.
Note: If you are using a Macintosh OS X operating system, select the Director menu, instead of
the Edit menu, to access Preferences.
2
Select a type of media for which you want to define an external editor.
3
Click Edit.
4
Click Browse or Scan to locate the application.
You can specify any application capable of editing the selected type of media.
5
To determine which editor appears when you double-click a cast member, do one of
the following:
■
If you prefer to make changes inside of Director and only occasionally want to use the
external editor, select Use Internal Editor.
■
If you prefer to use the external editor to make changes to the cast member, select Use
External Editor.
To launch an external editor:
1
Select a cast member of a media type for which you have defined an external editor, and do one
of the following:
■
If you specified Use External Editor when you defined the external editor for this media
type, double-click the cast member.
■
Select Edit > Launch External Editor.
■
While the cast member is selected and the Cast window is active, right-click (Windows) or
Control-click (Macintosh) and select Launch External Editor from the context menu.
Director launches or switches to the application that created the cast member, sending the
original data to the external editor.
Note: If you’ve specified an external editor and you want to edit a cast member with the Director
internal editors, select the cast member and select Edit > Edit Cast Member.