Month: May 2008

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Questions of the Week

Question: Where Can I Find Good Library of FLVs?

I would like to open my Captivate movie with some women, men, teenagers, seniors…  all looking puzzled with "thought captions" over them stating the different decisions confronting them… What car to buy… what college to go to… which applicant to hire, etc.

I have searched Google, using maybe with the wrong keywords, trying to find libraries of stock characters in Flash animations. Other than the few available on Adobe’s site under resources, I can’t seem to find any others. Do you know of any sources for increasing my library of these kind of things?
 

Answer

Excellent question. While there are many sites selling royalty free and inexpensive stock photos (BigStockPhoto is one that I’ve used in the past), it does not appear that there are many sites offering stock Flash video. I managed to find some videos at istockphoto.com, but there wasn’t a great selection. Let’s see if any of your fellow readers know of some good sites. If anyone can recommend resources for stock FLVs, please email me and I’ll post your responses here.

Question: How Do I Open a Captivate Template?

I’m perplexed by Captivate templates. I’ve been using and sharing a template for some time at my institution, and we recently decided to change our default screen resolution from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768.  Unfortunately, I’m finding that this means that our template’s screen capture now only grabs a small chunk of the screen.  I can’t find any way to resize the screen capture to accommodate our new resolution.  What the heck?  Do we need to build a new template every time we want to resize our screen capture window? (And if so, how can we do that?  I’ve seen well-designed templates in the Exchange, but I can’t reverse-engineer them because they’re saved as .cptl files.  Are they created in Flash and then exported somehow to Captivate?) Thanks for any light you can shed.

Answer

You can open a Captivate template (CPTL) via File > Open. Once the template is open, you can increase the capture area from 800×600 to 1024×768 by resizing the project (via the Project menu). Keep in mind however that if there are background images in the current template, increasing the size will likely result in a loss of resolution.

 

Got a question you’d like answered? Email me.

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Grammar Workshop: Who versus That and Which

by Jennie Ruby

Why do so many people use that or which to refer to human beings rather than using the word who? My personal theory is that people are afraid to use who, in case it should have been whom. Be that as it may, the right word to refer to a person or people is who/whom, not that/which. Look at this sentence, for example:

*The teenage students, half of which were not paying attention, did not ask any questions of the professor.*

When I first read this sentence I wondered half of what? Then I realized the writer meant half of the students! The sentence should have read:

The sleepy students, half of whom were not paying attention, did not ask any questions of the professor.

Here is another example:

*The people that were gathered there cheered as the limo zoomed by.*

It should be:

The people who were gathered there cheered as the limo zoomed by.

Watch out for this encroaching dehumanization in our language, and use who/whom for people. Worried about getting who/whom wrong? Try this quick check: is the word who/whom the subject of any verb in the sentence? If so, use who. If not, use whom:

I asked him who could go to the meeting in my place. (who is the subject of the verb could go)

I wondered whom I could choose for that onerous distinction. (whom is not the subject of any verb)

One more thing to watch for: if the word who/whom follows any form of the verb to be (is, was, were, are, was being, were being, will be), it should also be who:

That is who?

The winner will be who?

About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Essentials of Access 2000" and "Editing with MS Word 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 7" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.

Want help with a grammar issue? Email us your troubles and we’ll turn Jennie loose!

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Link of the Week

Free Training Video: Getting Started with Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite

RJ Jácquez, Adobe’s Senior Product Evangelist, has created a fantastic training video that will introduce you to the power of Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite.

You will learn about leveraging live and interactive 3D models from virtually any CAD/CAM/CAE software in your technical and instructional documents using the Adobe Technical Communication Suite.

You will learn how to reuse a 3D CAD file in Adobe FrameMaker 8, and then how to generate an interactive PDF.

Click here to watch the video.

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QuarkXPress 7: Don’t Let Text Box Overflows Sneak Up on You

When you create new QuarkXPress projects, you can elect to include an Automatic Text Box. You can then type as much text as you want into the text box, or you can import text via File > Import Text.

If there is more text than will fit inside an automatic text box, QuarkXPress will automatically add enough pages to accommodate the text). That’s great. But what happens if you’ve manually drawn a text box using one of the available text box tools and then add more text that will fit? Good question. Unlike automatic text boxes, the overflow text won’t have anywhere to go. When there is overflow text (also known as overset), an overflow marker will appear in the lower right of any text box containing overflow text.

QuarkXPress overflow text

If you ever come across a text box with an overflow alert, you essentially have four choices:

  1. You can ignore the overflow and print your project (not a good idea since the overflow text could be a single character or many, many paragraphs)
  2. Resize the text box until all of the overflow text appears and the red X disappears
  3. Resize the text box until all of the overflow text appears and the red X disappears; then delete the text that was causing the overflow
  4. Make the font size used by the story small enough for the overflow text to fit within the text box

Of course, none of the options above matter if you aren’t clued into the fact that one or more text boxes have overflow text. You wouldn’t be the first person to print a project with text boxes containing overflow text (it’s embarrassing but true).

Thankfully there’s a handy utility you can use to ensure that text box overflows don’t sneak up on you.

  1. Choose Utilities > Line Check > Search Criteria

  2. Remove the check mark from all of the available options except Text Box Overflow

  3. Click the Count button

    Search Criteria Box

    This is one place where a score of 0 is a good thing. If you see anything greater than 0 to the right of Text Box Overflow, click OK and go on a seek and destroy mission. When you find a text box with an overflow alert, take any one of the actions mentioned above (except the first one).

  4. Once the overflow marker(s) has been dealt with, run the Count again (Utilities > Line Check > Search Criteria) just to be safe.

Want to learn more about QuarkXPress? Click here.