Web designers often spend lots of time doing repetitive tasks, such as optimizing images or converting images to fit within certain constraints. Part of the power of Adobe FireWorks is its capability to automate and simplify many tedious drawing, editing, and file-conversion tasks.

To speed up your editing process, you can use Find and Replace to search for and replace elements within a file or elements from multiple files. You can find and replace elements such as URLs, fonts, color, text, and commands created in the History panel.

You can use the Batch Process feature to convert entire groups of image files into other formats or to change their color palettes. Batch Process can apply custom optimization settings to groups of files. You can also resize a group of files, making Batch Process an ideal tool for creating thumbnails.

Using the History panel, you can create commands that are shortcuts for commonly used features or create a script that can perform a complex series of steps. Fireworks can understand and execute JavaScript, so advanced users can automate very complex tasks by writing JavaScript commands and then executing them in Fireworks. You can control nearly every Fireworks command or setting through JavaScript using special JavaScript commands that Fireworks can interpret.

The Extension Manager lets you import, install, and delete extensions in Adobe applications to extend the capabilities of Fireworks.

This chapter covers the following topics:

Finding and replacing

Batch processing

Extending Fireworks

Flash SWF movies used as Fireworks panels