Month: May 2007

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Adobe RoboHelp HTML 6: Online, Interactive Course Available Now

We are proud to announce that our totally interactive, totally online RoboHelp HTML 6 course just went live.

The course, which consists of 100% interactive simulations, takes just a few hours to complete. What can you learn in just a few hours? Take a look at the following lessons (available to you, 7 days per week, 24 hours per day):
  • Create a New Project
  • Explore the RoboHelp Interface
  • Project Settings
  • Topic Properties and Project Folders
  • Importing Files
  • Edit a Topic
  • Importing PDFs
  • Create a Table of Contents
  • Spell Check
  • Create and Edit Links
  • Add Graphics
  • Apply a CSS
  • Apply Styles
  • Creating Indexes
  • Edit the Glossary
  • Conditional Build Tags
  • Publishing Projects
  • Compliant Output
  • Creating Reports
  • Multiple File Find and Replace
  • Tables
  • Create a CSS
  • Edit a CSS
  • Create Font Sets
  • See Also Keywords
  • Skins
  • Templates, Headers and Footers
  • User Defined Variables
  • Printed Documents and PDFs
  • Merging Projects

Click here to learn more about the course and to test drive a few of the lessons for free.

Click here to learn more about our step-by-step RoboHelp workbook. (Essentials of RoboHelp HTML 6).
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Question of the Week

Question:

I created a link in Captivate that takes the user to a Web site. However, when I close the window, the Captivate lesson is gone. Help!!! Is there a way to force the target Web site to appear in a new window?

Answer:

Yes, and it’s very easy to do.

First, show the Properties of the click box or button you are using to link the user to the Web site.

From the list to the right of URL, select New. You will also notice that Continue playing project will be active. You would deselect this option if you wanted the movie to stay where it is when the user clicks the link. When the user closes the new window and returns to the project, they will be on the same slide instead of potentially several slides down the line.

Linking users to New windows

Got a Question? Email it to us. We’ll publish the answer here for all the world to see.

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Adobe InDesign CS3: Saving Search Queries

You’ll find dozens of uses for InDesign’s Find/Change command (found in the Edit menu). By way of illustration, suppose you type (or Place) an article about dogs. Each occurrence of the word "dog"-and there could be thousands of occurrences-is bold. You decide to change the focus of the article to cats. You can use Find/Change to locate all occurrences of the word "dog" that are bold and replace them with the word "cat" set in italics.

You can also use Find/Change to search for nonprinting symbols (Hidden Characters) such as hard returns, tabs and multiple spacebar spaces. In your placed text file, the text was typed with two hard returns after every paragraph and two spaces at the end of each sentence. Typing two hard returns after every paragraph is not the correct way to control the amount of white space between block-style paragraphs. You control spacing by specifying a Space After amount in the Paragraph panel. Typing two spaces at the end of a sentence is correct on a typewriter, but incorrect for typesetting on a computer. On a computer, there should be only one space after a sentence.

Because you’ll find yourself finding and changing the same problems over and over, you will appreciate the fact that you can now save your Find/Change searches for future use in any InDesign document.

Use the Find/Change to Remove Extra Paragraph Breaks

Here’s how I used InDesign’s Find/Change command to remove several extra end of paragraph marks in a document.

  1. First I selected Edit > Find/Change to display the Find/Change dialog box
  2. On the Text tab, I clicked the Special characters for search button (the arrow to the right of the Find What area)
  3. I selected End of Paragraph

    The special character ^p appeared in the field.

    4. The Find/Change dialog box showing the end of paragraph mark

  4. I typed another ^p into the Find what area
  5. Then I typed ^p into the Change to area

    My Find what and Change to areas looked like the picture below.

    6. The Find/Change dialog box with both fields filled in

  6. I clicked Change All
  7. I was alerted that 14 replacements had been made

After fixing the problem in the document, it occurred to me that I’d run into this same problem the next time I imported text from the same author. I decided to save the Query I’d just run so that I could use it again down the road.

Save a Query

  1. I displayed the Find/Change dialog box again and made sure the last find/change I’d run was still in the dialog box
  2. I clicked the Save Query button The Save Query button

    The Save Query dialog box appeared.

  3. I typed Replace 2 End of Para with 1 into the Name field and clicked OK

    Naming a Query

    Now that the Query has been saved, I can quickly run the Query in the future and take care of this problem in any other InDesign documents.

To learn more about the new features in InDesign CS3, click here.

Click here to sample some of our 100% interactive simulations, including lessons on InDesign CS2.

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Adobe Captivate 2: Double Mouse Clicks Need to Be Told to “Hold Your Slide”

When creating a simulation, it may be necessary for you to include a Double mouse click action on a click box. The process of adding a Double mouse click is simple enough, but it can lead to a problem on the next slide, which I’ll show you how to fix in the text that follows.

Attach a Double Mouse Click Action to a Click Box

  1. Show the Properties of a Click Box (you can either double-click the Click Box or right-click it and choose Properties)
  2. On the Options tab, select Double mouse click and then click OK

    Enable the Double Mouse Click

See, that was simple enough. Of course, I promised a problem and a cure, and I aim to deliver.

If you were to play the movie from the slide you just edited, the double-click would work. However, if the next slide has a click box with a Failure caption–which is likely if you are creating a simulation–you are likely to see a Failure caption even though you didn’t intentionally click on the wrong part of the slide. For whatever reason, the double-click from the previous slide gets treaded like a third click. That third click counts on the next slide. Since you aren’t likely to click in the correct part of the slide, the Failure caption appears.

While the problem is not a tragedy, we didn’t want a Failure caption to appear if the user hadn’t done anything wrong. Here’s our workaround:

  1. We inserted a Blank slide after the slide with the Double mouse click (we affectionately call these new slides holding slides)
  2. We right-clicked the slide with the Double mouse click and chose Copy Slide Background
  3. We right-clicked the holding slide and chose Paste as Background

    Now the slide with the Click Box and the holding slide looked identical.

  4. Last but not least, we displayed the properties of the duplicate slide and set the slide timing to .1 second (one-tenth of a second)

    Changing the Display time for a Slide

When playing the movie back and double-clicking the Click Box, the holding slide, which doesn’t have anything on it except the previous slide’s background, absorbs the stray click. Since there isn’t anything on the Holding slide and it displays for such a short time, the fix is transparent to the user.

Want to learn more about Adobe Captivate 2? Click here.

Click here to sample some of our 100% interactive simulations.

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Adobe InDesign: Go Ahead and Quick, Apply Yourself

Adobe InDesign sports a nifty Quick Apply utility that will make quick work out of such mundane tasks as finding and applying styles, menu commands, scripts, and variables-almost anything that can be accessed with your keyboard.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to wade through a long list of styles before finding the one I needed. Now all I have to know is the name of the style or other InDesign feature I want to use and let the Quick Apply list do most of the work for me.

Using the Quick Apply list to create a new InDesign document

Here’s how Quick Apply Works

Let’s say you want to create a new InDesign document and you cannot remember the command is available via File > New Document. All you can remember is you want a file.

  1. The Quick Apply buttonAccess the Quick Apply list by either clicking the Quick Apply button located at the upper right of the InDesign window or press [control] [enter]
  2. Start typing the name of the command you would like to access. For instance, instead of choosing File > New > Document to display the New Document dialog box, you can type Fi to display File menu commands in the Quick Apply list
  3. Press the down arrow key on your keyboard a few times to highlight File Menu:New > Document in the Quick Apply list
  4. Press [enter] and Bam! The New Document dialog box appears.

Okay, maybe that’s too much work for you to display the New Document dialog box. Who am I to argue? But how about this?

Quick Apply a Style

Let’s say you have a style in your document called Headlines. Here’s how the Quick Apply button will help you get your work done faster, without having to remember the keyboard shortcut for applying the Headlines style (if there was a shortcut assigned to the style). Using this technique, you don’t even have to know where the Paragraph Styles panel is–you only have to know that the Headlines style exists in the document.

  1. Using the Type Tool, click in a paragraph that you’d like to format with the Headlines style
  2. Press  [control] [enter] to display the Quick Apply list
  3. Type Hea for Headlines

    Hey look, the Headlines style is in the list

  4. I’d press Enter and then, Bam, Bam! You’ve got style! Headlines, that is.

To learn more about the new features in InDesign CS3, click here.

Click here to sample some of our 100% interactive simulations, including lessons on InDesign CS2.

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Adobe RoboHelp 7 Preview: Exciting Enhancements

During the recent STC conference in Minneapolis, Akshay Madan, Adobe Product Manager for RoboHelp, previewed the next version of RoboHelp–Adobe RoboHelp 7.

Among the Many Exciting Enhancements:

  • Support for MS Vista and Office 2007
  • The ability to have more than one topic open at one time
  • A totally retooled user interface (UI) that features customizable panels
  • You will be able to create multiple TOCs for your Single Source Layouts
  • You will be able to create Snippets–reusable blocks of text and or graphics
  • There’s going to be improved FrameMaker support. You will now be able to import FrameMaker files into RoboHelp and keep such goodies as variables and conditional text.
  • And you can add Breadcrumbs that will show users where they are in your Help system

Keep in mind that the features mentioned here are from a pre-beta version of RoboHelp 7 and that things are likely to change. Even so, if you’re a RoboHelp fan like me, this should get the blood pumping!

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Question of the Week:

Question:

After adding a SWF animation to my project, I noticed that Captivate’s menu’s are useless. The menus appear for a second then close. All menu actions must be made by shortcut keys. In order to stop the behavior, I had to close and then reopen the project. Have you seen this behavior?

Answer:

The behavior you’re talking about is a Captivate bug (albeit a minor bug). The bug often bites when you import SWF animations. My feeling is that Captivate 2 isn’t completely finished inserting the animation at some kind of internal level. The bug symptoms are just like you’re pressing the escape key on your keyboard and trying to click a menu at the same time-the two actions would cancel each other out.

Keyboard shortcuts still work even after the bug bites. Press [ctrl] [s] to save your work. Then click the object you just imported on your library and the strange behavior should stop.  (Or you can close the project via the close button on the window.)

Got a Question? Email it to us. We’ll publish the answer here for all the world to see.

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Are You Certifiable? Become an Adobe Certified Associate!

There’s a new line of certifications in town. Adobe has announced the new Adobe Certified Associate suite of exams that will help validate your ability to create, manage, integrate and communicate information using Adobe’s multimedia, video, graphic and Web software.

For more information, click here.

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Link of the Week: Adobe RoboHelp 6 Co-Stars with Adobe Captivate 2

Adobe Captivate is arguably the nation’s top application for creating e-learning simulations.

Adobe RoboHelp is arguably the nation’s top Help authoring tool.

And John Daigle is one of the top RoboHelp and Captivate experts in the country.

If only you could put the three together… maybe you’d have something…

Actually, John has written five easy-to-read tutorials that will have you integrating your Captivate projects with your RoboHelp projects like a pro. Anyone who uses both RoboHelp and Captivate should check out John’s tutorials… it’ll be time well-spent.

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Adobe Captivate 2: Create Reusable Buttons That Play Sound Effects

I recently had a student in my Captivate class ask how she could force a button to play a sound, but nothing else. Usually buttons are used to move a user through the CBT, jump to a Web site or launch a JavaScript.

At first, asking a button to actually do less than its design seems like a simple thing to do. However, you might be surprised to learn that the process is a bit more complicated than expected and will require a bit of tinkering on your part.

The process of inserting a button onto a slide and attaching a sound to the button is simple enough (Insert > Button and then use the Audio tab to attach the audio). But if you were to preview the project, you’d quickly realize that the sound plays by itself–before the user can click it. Want the sound to play only after the user clicks the button? Read on…

Insert a button (without audio)

  1. Open or create a Captivate project with at least a few slides
  2. Open a slide
  3. Choose Insert > Button (you can use either a text or image button for this experiment)
  4. Set the On success to No Action

    Button set to No Action

  5. Select the Options tab
  6. Select Success caption (ensure the remaining options match the picture below)

    Success Caption selected

  7. Click OK

    There should now be both a button and a Success caption on your slide.

Attach Audio to the Success caption

  1. Double-click the Success caption
  2. Delete any text
  3. Change the Caption type to [transparent]

    Success Caption Transparent Style

  4. Select the Options tab
  5. Change the Transition Effect to No transition

    Caption Transition set to No Transition

  6. Select the Audio tab and import your audio

    Audio Attached to a Caption

  7. Click OK

If you preview your project now and click the button, you should hear the sound. (Very clever of you to attach the audio to a transparent caption!) But there is a problem. While the button can be clicked over and over, the sound will only play once. Bummer! Now what? If you could get the slide to somehow refresh, that would make the button think that it hadn’t been clicked and take care of things. But how to you refresh a Captivate slide? Read on…

Refresh a Slide

  1. Insert a blank slide before the slide with the button (Insert > Blank Slide)
  2. Right-click the slide with the button and choose Copy Background
  3. Right-click the slide you just inserted and choose Paste as Background (click Yes when prompted)

    Now the slide you inserted will look identical to the slide with the button (sans button).

  4. Right-click the slide you inserted one final time and choose Properties
  5. Change the slide’s Display Time to .1 second (one-tenth of a second)

    Slide Timing Set to .1 second

  6. Click OK
  7. Finally, go to the slide with the button
  8. Right-click the button and choose Properties
  9. On the Button tab, change the On success to Jump to Slide and select the slide just previous to the slide with the button (you know, the slide where you changed the Display time to .1 second)

    Jump to Slide

  10. Click OK

    Play the project now and, when you click the  button, the sound should play.

    In addition, clicking the button takes you to the slide preceding the slide with the button. Since that slide plays so fast (you set its timing to .1 second), and looks like the slide with the button, it should hardly be noticeable that you left the slide with the button at all. And if you click the button again, the sound should play again. How cool is that????

Want to learn more about Adobe Captivate 2? Click here.

Click here to sample some of our 100% interactive simulations.