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)

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.