eLearning Question: Should The Audio Match the Text?
I'm creating interactive simulations in Captivate. I'm going to include narration. In your opinion, should the narration that the user will hear exactly match the text captions they will see?
Answer
Best practice where audio is concerned is to ensure it does not match the text captions 100% or else your users will get lulled to sleep. Typical audio is more flushed out than the text captions, which follow the same general rule as bulleted text.
I would suggest keeping the audio clips short and importing them onto slides along with no more than one text caption and an interactive object.
If the audio needs to go on and on, I would suggest splitting the audio into smaller chunks and making more slides. This will result in faster production times on your end, a snappier final product for your learners and one that will stream better over the Web.
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Adobe Captivate Question: Any Idea Why My Preview Doesn't Work?
I've created a course with 20 questions using Captivate 3. The SWF file functions fine, but when I open it with the corresponding .htm file, it freezes up a few questions in. To make it more strange, it appears to only do this on my PC. When I place the course on the Intranet with a link to the htm, it appears to function fine on several other PCs, except mine. Have you ever encountered this?
Answer:
It sounds like you've got a Flash Security issue. Click here to see an article on my BLOG that should help.
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Adobe Captivate Question: Templates in Captivate… What's the Difference?
While a Captivate Project Template allows one to define a standard structure and layout, does it also define visual properties for the included objects (i.e. captions, highlight boxes, etc.) or does that require a Design Template be created and then applied to the Project Template?
Answer:
The two templates are often confused.
Project Templates are used as you create new projects. They allow you to start with consitent objects in your project and pre-determine the size of the recording area before you record. Typical project templates contain splash screens, placeholder text areas and animations.
Design Templates allow you to ensure consitency of objects in existing projects. For instance, you can set up the appearance of highlight boxes in a Design Template and apply those attributes to existing Captivate projects (just in case a rogue developer has decided to use their own colors in their highlight boxes).
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Adobe RoboHelp Question: Is There A Best Practice for Importing Word Images?
I've imported several Word documents into RoboHelp that contain screen shots with text boxes and arrows.
After I imported the Word documents and generated the topic in RoboHelp, the text boxes and arrows are not positioned where they should be. It appears the users placed the images in Word, screen shot one image, text box second image, arrow third image.
I tried to recreate the page in RoboHelp by just retaining the screen shot, then creating a positioned text box and inserting an arrow image in the box with the text in RoboHelp. Alas, when I generate the topic the text box does not remain anchored where it should.
What am I doing wrong? Short of having to do a screen capture that contains all three images in Word (without layering), can I get this to work in RoboHelp?
Answer:
Word objects do not import correctly into RoboHelp (when I say object, I mean screen captures teamed with Word's drawing objects such as arrows and callouts). In the past, I have selected the objects, grouped them, cut them to the clipboard and repasted into the Word documents as a single object (via Paste Special). If memory serves, that took care of the problem once the document was imported into RoboHelp. In addition, your images need to be inline with the text and paragraphs, not floating like you would for a layout.
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