Converting lines to fills

Question

A client of mine has all these product logos that have a
thick 10-point outline around the text.
When I import these logos into Flash I always want to convert
the outline to a fill, because otherwise when I use alpha to fade
the logo in and out during transitions, half of the outline
(typically black) will be visible through the text (typically
white) which looks really nasty. Ideally I would just move the text
away from the outline, convert the outline to a fill, then move the
text back onto the outline, and use "break apart" on the text twice
until the text is a fill as well. This 'punches a hole' in the
outline that fits the text perfectly, so there's no overlapping,
which means the logo will look fine when the alpha is less than
100%.
The problem with converting the outline to a fill is that
Flash is a complete idiot. Whenever the lines intersect or overlap,
Flash will convert the lines to a bizarre set of angular shapes
that look nothing like the original outline. Some parts will even
disappear.
Sometimes I've been able to solve this very painstakingly by
selecting a few lines that are separate from eachother, moving them
offside, converting to fills, and repeating this process as many
times as it takes. But sometimes, lines are 'untouchable', that is
if you click to select them, they change shape, and if you deselect
or undo they return to the original shape.
I've given up hope on Adobe making Flash convert lines to
fills properly, since this weirdness has been around for like 10
years now, so my question is how can I get around this problem? Is
there a 'convert lines to fills' command in Illustrator (never
worked with it) that works better?

Answer 1

If you have Illustrator, I would recommend prepping your
vector logos in there first. Object->Path->OutlineStroke and
the Pathfinder palette will be your best friends. You may want to
create an action, as there are going to be a lot of repetitive
tasks involved in this.
This assumes you need to keep these graphics as vector
images. If that isn’t important, you could simply render an
image sequence from Flash, import the raster images, and use those
instead.