Importing graphics from Adobe Illustrator to Flash is a nightmare when it comes to precision graphics. Incredibly enough, an utterly fine graphic in Illustrator may turn up all shoddy in Flash.

To prove a point, here's a clip of the vector curve in Illustrator at 600% zoom:

A curve in Adobe Illustrator

After SWF export at maximum quality (10) and import to Flash, the very same curve looked like this:

A curve in Adobe Flash CS4

The above blue curve is fine and basically identical to the one in Illustrator, but the object that should actually fit to the curve (notice the brown area) makes a truly shoddy object.

In order to get back to the original curve, quite a few curvepoints had to be removed and handles severely adjusted in Flash itself.

The rumour says that Flash CS5 will bring changes in Text Layout Engine, introduce iPhone exporter and a lot of optimisations as did the most recent AIR and Flash Player updates. Let's hope that CS5 will also improve the precision of the graphics parser. It really should.