Printing all sprites in an LDM, including those outside the crop?

Question

Thanks for all the help so far. I’m not sure where to
begin on this one…
I’ve got a cropped LDM sprite which I’m
essentially treating as a document object. The user can drag
various items into the LDM, arrange those items, then hopefully
print. The “document” is scrolled by shuffling the
sprites within the LDM. At some point the user will want to print
the document which means I must print all sprites in the LDM, not
just those that happen to be showing on stage at the current scroll
position. At first glance I thought I might be able to switch the
framing property from crop to scale then print the stage using
Print-O-Matic, unfortunately it appears the only playback property
of an LDM that can be tested or set is the scriptEnable property.
If I were using an MIAW instead of an LDM I could easily scale the
drawRect but MIAWs introduce far more problems in this instance
than they solve. Anyone have an idea for an approach?
PS: I forgot to mention that the LDM sprites may be rotated
as well as scaled. This prevents a simple interation using
drawPicture from being a solution. Also, the majority of sprite
members are vector based SWFs

Answer 1

If you are dragging items into the LDM, then I assume that
the Stage shares a cast with the LDM. In this case is there any
reason why it must be an LDM? Why not use a filmLoop? Here's a neat
trick:
vFilmLoop = member(5)
new(#filmLoop, vFilmLoop)
vFilmLoop.media = the score
And conversely:
the score = vFilmLoop.media
You could use this to place the items inside the filmLoop, so
that you can use its rect to crop the view port, and then make the
Stage big enough to show all the items in the filmLoop, set the
score to the media of the filmLoop, and print the Stage. As soon as
you've done that, you restore the original score, and hey presto,
your filmLoop is back in its view port again.
If you can handle my verbose Director 5 newbie Lingo, you
might have some fun with this article:
Interactive
filmLoops.