Month: June 2007

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Adobe Captivate 2: Learn to Improve the Appearance of Text in a Transparent Caption

You can insert a Text Caption in Adobe Captivate 2 by choosing Insert > Text Caption. If you’ve used Captivate even a little bit, I’m not telling you something you probably didn’t learn early on.

But you may not know that one of the Caption Types available to you is [transparent], which simply means your Text Caption will not use any of the bitmap images used in the other types of Text Captions.

Transparent captions are useful for text you intend to show on your introductory slides where it may not be appropriate to use any of the other Text Caption types.

One problem you may notice if you use a transparent Text Caption is the quality of the text may seem a bit lacking when you publish or preview the movie (the text looks fine while you’re working in Edit view).

While it may seem strange, you can use the following steps to increase the quality of the text you see in the Text Caption.

  1. Insert a new Text Caption
  2. Type and format the text with the font and font size of your choice.
  3. Preview the project and notice the appearance of the text in the Text Caption.

    4. In the example below, I used Verdana as my font. The font looks a bit blurry and the spacing between the letters just isn’t right. Generally speaking the text looks a bit "off."

    A Text Caption with text that's not looking so good.

  4. Show the Properties of the Text Caption (you can right-click a Text Caption and choose Properties)
  5. Select any character in the text caption (you can highlight a letter, word–anything in the caption)
  6. Using the Highlight tool located at the far right of the Text Caption dialog box, change the Highlight color of the selected text to #C0C0C0

    7. Set the highlight color of text in a Text Caption

  7. Click OK
  8. Preview the project again.

    This time, notice that the Highlight color you applied to the selected text does not appear when you preview the slide. In addition, the appearance of the text in the Text Caption is much better!

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 RoboHelp 6 HTML: Multi-Fix It with the Multi-Find and Replace Tool

One of the limitations of Adobe RoboHelp 6 HTML is that you can only open one project Topic at a time. If you need to fix editorial problems in multiple topics, and you don’t want to use another authoring tool like Dreamweaver, you’re stuck opening one topic at a time in the WYSIWYG pane, fixing the problem and then plodding on to the next problem.

Or you can use the RoboHelp’s Multi-File Find and Replace tool, which gives you the ability to change phrases or words for multiple topics in a project–at one time.

Use the Multi-File Find and Replace Tool to Replace One Word with Another

  1. Click the Tools button beneath the Project pane

    2. RoboHelp Buttons

  2. Double-click Multi-File Find and Replace tool

    3. The Multi-File Find and Replace Tool

    The Multi-File Find and Replace options appear.

    Multi-File Find and Replace window

  3. Type the text you’d like to find into the Find area
  4. Type your replacement text into the Replace area

    5. Multi-File Find and Replace options filled in

  5. Click the Browse button
  6. Open the folder containing your project and then click OK
  7. Click the Find button

    8. The project will be searched and any occurrences of the text you specified in the Find area will be found.

  8. Click the Replace All button
  9. Click OK
  10. Click Close

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

You can now teach yourself RoboHelp via our online, interactive lessons. Click here to learn more about the course and to test drive a few of the lessons for free.

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QuarkXPress 7: Job Jackets will Keep You Out of the Rubber Room!

One of the biggest problems with working in a team environment is a lack of communication between the budget people, the designers and the print publishers. Any miscommunication during the production phase can manifest itself negatively by throwing your budget out of whack. For instance, let’s assume your printing budget is very tight. Every dollar counts. You can afford to print 5,000 copies of a four-page newsletter. And you can afford to use a few spot colors. As the art director for the newsletter, you type up the strict specifications and send the instructions, along with the assets needed to create the newsletter to your QuarkXPress expert.

The newsletter is completed and sent to the printer. All is right with the world. Until–you get the bill from the printer. The newsletter was six pages instead of four. And the layout "accidentally" used process colors instead of spot colors. As a result, your bill is significantly higher than you budgeted. Ooops!

Say hello to Job Jackets! You can create a Job Jacket that controls the specifications of a layout at the time it is created. And you can create rules in the Job Jacket that will evaluate the layout before it is sent to the printer and flag anything that doesn’t follow your specifications.

Create a New Job Jacket

  1. Display the Job Jackets Manager by choosing Utilities > Job Jackets Manager

    Any Job Jackets previously created would be listed in the Job Jackets Manager. There are two modes: Basic and Advanced. By default, the Job Jackets Manager appears in Basic Mode.

    2. Job Jackets Manager

  2. Click the New Job Jacket button

    3. Job Jackets button

    The New Job Jacket dialog box appears.

    New Job Jacket

  3. Give the Job Jacket a name and destination
  4. Click OK

Create a Layout Specification

  1. Click the Advanced Settings button (in the lower left of the dialog box)

    The Job Jackets Manager splits into three panes.

  2. From the Resources area, scroll down and select Layout Specifications

    Layout Specifications

  3. From just above the Layout Specifications area, click the New Item button

    New Item tool

    An item named Layout Specifications appears.

  4. Click Save

Set Resource Specifications

  1. Display the Job Jackets Manager (choose Utilities > Job Jackets Manager)
  2. Select your Job Jacket from the Job Jacket list at the left
  3. Select Layout Specifications from the list of Resources

    The Layout Specification item you created earlier appears in the panel below.

  4. Click the plus sign (or Triangle) to the left of Layout Specification

    Typical job specifications such as Page Count, Page Width and Page Height appear in a list.

  5. Click the word Any to the right of Page Count and
    type 4
  6. Click the word Any to the right of Top Margin and
    type 12p

    Resources Manager

    Any layouts based on this Job Jacket will now automatically contain 4 pages. Each page will also have a top margin of 12 picas (2 inches)

  7. Click Save

Stay tuned! Next week you will learn how to create a Ticket based on a Job Jacket.

Want to learn more about QuarkXPress 7? Click here.

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Question of the Week

Question:

I’m trying to bring Captivate SWF files into Flash so that we have a Flash container to hold the Captivate SWFs.

When the Captivate SWF file is first brought into Flash, its coordinates are 0, 0 on the container, and the Captivate SWF works fine.  If I move the location of the Captivate SWF, to say 100, 100, I generate a Failure Caption when clicking on the Playback Control.  This problem only occurs once I have shifted the location of the Captivate SWF inside the Flash container.

Do you know of any fix for this problem?

Answer:

Great question. I haven’t experienced the problem you describe. If anyone out there has experiened this problem, please send your solutions and I’ll publish them here.

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Questions of the Week

Question:

Do you know how to adjust the bookmark settings for a Captivate lesson? We essentially would like to have the user always start at the beginning of the course, no matter where they left off last time they were in the course.  We are having a lot of issues with our published Captivate movies automatically bookmarking pages when they are taken through our LMS.  For example, I take the course and everything works fine.  The next user opens the course and it jumps to the last page of the course.  The user then has to drag the black caret in the skin to the beginning of the course.  As you can imagine, it is causing all sorts of frustration.

Answer:

What you’re asking is possible, but you’ll need to edit some HTML. You’ll find more information on the Captivate forums at this link.

Question:

Captivate 2 becomes unstable when I import an animation. By unstable I mean I can’t access menus, they drop down (open) but immediately close. Is this a common problem? Are there software updates that address this? Suggestions? References?

Answer:

I experience it myself just about every time I import animation. I have no idea why Captivate behaves this way, but the problem is not lethal. To stop the wacky behavior, you can show the Library and click the Library instance of the animation you just imported.

Question:

Most of the applications that I teach require a user-specific sign-on.  I created a training project for one such application [Groupwise e-mail].  When I recorded it, it looked fine. When I preview it, the password field is messed up. The cursor is blinking 2 spaces to the right of where it needs to be and I can’t move the cursor to the right place. If I enter the password where the cursor is, I get an "incorrect" message. I can’t get past this slide. Any thoughts about what I’m doing wrong or how to correct/avoid this?

Answer:

You’ve just discovered that the slide you’re working on and the slide you preview won’t always match–especially with Text Entry fields. It will take a bit of trial and error until you get things in the perfect spot. While you’re in Edit mode, can easily select the Text Entry field and drag it until it is in the correct position on your slide. You will not be able to move the Text Entry field while previewing.

If you’re trying to let a user type anything in the field and allow the entry to be correct, remove the check mark from Infinite Attempts and ensure the Failure caption is disabled.

Question Follow-up From Last Week:

I’ve created a page with two rollovers. I added audio to the rollovers. When you go away from the first rollover the sound continues to play. If you rollover the second rollover while the first one is playing both rollovers play until completed. The answer I found on Adobe was that this has been fixed in Captivate 2. Any suggestions on what I can do in my Captivate 1 version?

Answer:

Fellow subscriber Christine M. Dandaraw offers the following: "I created a branch where the first rollover goes to a second audio free slide–but you can only play 1 audio at a time!"

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

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Adobe RoboHelp HTML 6: New DLL Available for Download

Adobe has released an updated DLL for Adobe RoboHelp 6 HTML that improves how RoboHelp names Topic Titles when you import topics. Currently, imported Topic Titles will have underscores instead of spaces. After installing the DLL, you will not need to rename your Topic Titles and manually remove the underscore.

For more information, and to download the DLL, click here.

You can now teach yourself RoboHelp via our online, interactive lessons. 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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Adobe Captivate: Strip It Bare

If you've copied and pasted text from another application, such as MS Word, into an Adobe Captivate Text Caption, you have probably been frustrated by how difficult it is to remove the formatting from the text.

For instance, I recently pasted a paragraph from my MS Word script. I was happy to see that text formatting such as font, style (bold, italic, etc.) and size was retained. However, I noticed that there was a first-line indent in the paragraph that I could not remove because Captivate does not have the ability to create, let alone remove, a first-line indent.

What's a developer to do? Read on…

  1. Select and copy the text you want to use in your Captivate Text Caption to the Clipboard (Edit > Copy)
  2. Start NotePad (one quick way to start NotePad is to choose Start > Run to display the Run dialog box, type notepad and then press ENTER)
  3. Paste the text from the Clipboard into the NotePad window (Edit > Paste)

    4. You will notice that none of the text formatting from the Word document is retained in the NotePad window. Now the last thing to do is to get the text transferred from the NotePad window to your Captivate Text Caption.

  4. Press [Ctrl] [a] to select all of the text in the NotePad window and then press [Ctrl] [c] to copy the selected text to the clipboard
  5. Switch to Adobe Captivate and insert a new Text Caption
  6. Press [Ctrl] [v] to paste the NotePad text into the Captivate Text Caption (sans formatting from the Word document).

Want to learn more about Adobe Captivate 4? Click here.

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Link of the Week: Learn to Add Captions to Flash Video

Michael A. Jordan, an interactive technology lead at Modernista!, a Boston-based creative agency, has written a nice article on adding captions to Flash video without having to write a lot of ActionScript.

According to Jordan, "The FLVPlayback component skins with captioning support make it easy to provide captions for Flash video. The skins were originally developed to display captions embedded in FLV (Flash video) files using Captionate, but they will also display captions embedded in specially formatted Flash Video Encoder or ActionScript cue points."

Click here to read the article.

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Adobe RoboHelp HTML 6: Image Maps Made Easy

Image Maps allow the user to click on a particular area (hotspots) of an image and jump to different areas of your Help project. Image Maps are made up of two elements: An image, which can be a GIF or JPEG, and hotspots. Hotspots (also known as clickable regions) can target Web addresses, other topics (that are either in your project or another), email addresses or PDF files. You can create circle, polygon or rectangle clickable regions.

  1. Open or create a new topic
  2. Insert a new image or select an existing image
  3. Locate the Create Image Map Using Rectangle Shape tool on the Objects toolbar

    4. Image Map Tools in RoboHelp

  4. Using the Create Image Map Using Rectangle Shape tool, draw a box a small part of the selected image

    The instant you finish drawing what appears to be a square over the image, the Image Map dialog box will appear.

  5. Select any of your topics from the list of Topics
  6. Click OK

    The red box you see on your image is the hotspot. You can move the red box, resize it or delete it. If your Image Map link is wrong, you can double-click the red box and change the link.

    7. Finished HotSpot in RoboHelp

You can now teach yourself RoboHelp via our online, interactive lessons. 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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Questions of the Week

Question:

I’ve created a page with two rollovers. I added audio to the rollovers. When you go away from the first rollover the sound continues to play. If you rollover the second rollover while the first one is playing both rollovers play until completed. The answer I found on Adobe was that this has been fixed in Captivate 2. Any suggestions on what I can do in my Captivate 1 version?

Answer:

Sorry to say but I no longer have Macromedia Captivate on my system so I cannot even go back to that old version and try to provide a workaround. If anyone still using Macromedia Captivate, and can offer a solution, please email it to me. The issue was resolved in Adobe Captivate 2. And since Captivate 2 was a marked improvement over Macromedia Captivate, I’d strongly encourage upgrading.

Question:

I have been working with importing slides from PowerPoint into Adobe Captivate 2 and am having trouble with the quality of the graphics.  It is much easier to lay out my slide in PowerPoint; however, the graphics appear fuzzy after they are imported into Captivate.  Have you ever seen this before or do you know how I can prevent it from happening?

Answer:

There are some steps you can take within PowerPoint to maximize the quality of the slides when they end up in Captivate.

The trick is to get the PowerPoint presentation resized to the same size as your Captivate project before you import it into Captivate. I wrote an article last month in this newsletter that details the process. Click here to review that article.

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