If you are aligning content in Flash that uses the Stage width or height as a variable (e.g., you want to center a MovieClip) and you do it on initialization (i.e., in code and on the first frame), you may run in to this issue. Here is an image demonstrating what you might see:

Note that in the “before” screen, the content is centered horizontally, while in the “after” screen, the content is only half-visible and appears to be “centered” on the left margin.

If you run a test – output the Stage width to a text field, you’ll see that the width will be returned as 0.

As far as I know, there are two solutions to this problem. If you’re embedding your Flash using swfObject, then make sure that you omit the “scale” attribute. For example, modify the following:

var params = {
    bgcolor: "#000000",
    menu: "false",
    scale: "noScale",
    allowFullScreen: true
};

To something that looks like this:

var params = {
    bgcolor: "#000000",
    menu: "false",
    allowFullScreen: true
};

Alternatively, if you absolutely need that attribute. You can create an “EnterFrame” event listener that detects when the Stage width is greater than 0 and then remove the listener. Here’s an example in ActionScript 2:

this.onEnterFrame = function() {
    if (Stage.width > 0) {
        init(); // Pass to initialization function
        this.onEnterFrame = null; // Clear enterFrame listener
    }
}

This will NOT work:

<!DOCTYPE root [
<!ENTITY sample SYSTEM "sample.xml">
]>
<root>
&sample;
</root>


How disappointing. I understand the rationale, but It’s unfortunate that this capability is completely unavailable.