Month: May 2009

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Adobe Photoshop CS4: Resample or Not? That is the Question!

by Barbara Binder 

Coming up with the right resolution for an image can be tricky, especially when you are not yet sure how you intend to output your image. Print files need lots of pixel information, or detail (i.e., 266-300 ppi), while files intended for e-mail or posting on a web page can get away with a whole lot less (i.e., 72 ppi).

Knowing that Photoshop is really good at throwing away extra pixels (downsampling), but not so good at adding new ones (upsampling), most of us set our digital cameras to their highest possible resolution, for maximum flexibility.

So how come the files say that they are just 72 ppi (pixels per inch) when you open them up for the first time? The key is learning to understand the Image > Image Size dialog box. Here's how the dialog box looks when I open up an image freshly transferred from my camera:

Image Size dialog box

Yes, the dialog box indicates my file is just 72 ppi, but take a look at the document width and height: 45.333 inches by 34 inches! To figure out how large I can print it, I do two things:

  1. Deselect the Resample Image checkbox.
  2. Change the resolution to 300 ppi.
With Resample Image off, I keep the exact same number of pixels in the image, but they become smaller when I increase the resolution. This dialog box tells me I can print anything up to an 8" x 10" with this camera (with a little room for cropping).

Image Size dialog box with Resample Image deselected

 
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Want to take a 2-day, live, online Adobe Photoshop with me? Click here.
 
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About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers in the world.
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Featured Online Classes

Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts

Congratulations! You've been selected to write the user manual for your company's next big software release. And following that, you've been invited to write the script for the company's Employee Benefits portal and eLearning lessons.

What's that you say? It's been a while since you had to write at such a granular level? Maybe you think your writing could be better? Or perhaps, like many tasked with writing training materials and scripts or user documentation, writing qualifies as "other duties as assigned."

This live, interactive writing course is designed for you. Think of it as an intensive retreat that will give the jump-start you need to create clear, concise step-by-step documentation that effectively educates and motivates adult learners.

To learn more about this class, click here.

 
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Upgrading from Adobe Captivate 3 to version 4

Adobe Captivate 4 is jammed full of new goodies… you may not be able to find them all without a little help.

 
Join me for a 3-hour, live online training event and learn how to use the new Captivate 4 features–and where the Captivate 3 features you've grown to know and love have gone.
 
To learn more about this class, click here.
 
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Advanced Adobe Captivate 4

So, you've been working with Adobe Captivate 4 for a while; now you want to see what else the program can do to push your eLearning to the next level! Great! This class is for you.

To learn more about this class, click here.

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Questions of the Week

Adobe RoboHelp Question: RoboHelp on a Mac?

Does RoboHelp support Mac? Or, does a Mac support RoboHelp?

Answer

If you generate WebHelp, FlashHelp or AirHelp, those layouts will run on a Macintosh. However, the RoboHelp software is not available (and has never been available) for the Mac. 

 
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Adobe Captivate Question: When Will Your Advanced Captivate Book Ship?

Hi. I am eager to receive your new Captivate book (Beyond the Essentials). Any idea when it will begin shipping?

Answer:

The book went to the printer last week. According to representatives at my fullfillment house, it will begin shipping this week. You can order the book here.

 
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Adobe Captivate Question: Why Can't I See the Playbar without Scrolling?

Can you please assist me with the following: my original project size is 960 x 720. When I play it in a 1024 x 768 screen resolution, I have to scroll down to see the playback bar. Any idea why?

Answer:

Depending on how many toolbars you have open in your Web browser, 960 can take up a huge chunk of your screen. That's why I suggest a maximum size of 800×600. Even then, depending on the browser setup, things can get tight.

 
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QuarkXPress Question: Do You Have a Book for 8?

Greetings. I am a big fan of your QuarkXPress 7 book. Do you happen to have a book about QuarkXPress version 8?

Answer:

 
Yes. I have a beginner QuarkXPress 8 book available here.

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Got a question you'd like answered? Email me.
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Grammar Workshop: Every day or Everyday?

"When should I use every day and when should I use everyday? My boss wants to know."

I received this query by e-mail and quickly shot off a reply: "You use everyday as an adjective and as an adverb."

After I hit send, I wondered whether I should verify that this distinction is always true, so I looked it up in The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style. To my relief, I had it right. Here are examples of how to use everyday versus every day.

  • You may well use this advanced program feature every day.
  • This is an everyday fix for common system problems.

You can tell you need the solid version (no space) if everyday is followed by a noun. An everyday exercise, an everyday occurrence. You can tell you need every day open (spaced) when it answers the question "when does the action of this sentence occur?"

  • Things like this happen every day.
  • Every day he saves the files to the external hard drive.
In both sentences, every day answers when: when do things like this happen? Every day. When does he save the files? Every day.

When will I answer grammar questions for you? Every day! 
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About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and "Editing with MS Word 2007" 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.

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Join Jennie in our online classes (she'll be teaching two upcoming classes for IconLogic): Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts and Editing with Microsoft Word 2007.

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Adobe Captivate 4: Adding Accessibility Text to Slides… As Easy as 1, 2, 3

by Kevin A. Siegel 

You can use Adobe Captivate to create eLearning lessons that are accessible to users who have visual, hearing, mobility or other types of disabilities.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publishes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a document that specifies what designers should do to their Web content to make it accessible. Today, many countries including the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, and countries in Europe have adopted accessibility standards based on those developed by the W3C.

In the United States, the law that governs accessibility is commonly known as Section 508. Part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 508 requires that federal agencies develop or use information technology that is accessible to people with disabilities. You can learn more about Section 508 by visiting www.section508.gov.

Generally speaking, eLearning is considered accessible if it can be accessed and used by people without depending on a single sense or ability. Users should be able to move through your lessons using either a keyboard or a mouse. In addition, your lessons should include visual and auditory elements to support both hearing and visually impaired customers.

One of the easiest things you can do to make your Captivate projects accessible is to select Enable Accessibility (Edit > Preferences > Project > Publish Settings). Combine this simple act with filling in the Project name and Description (File > Document Info) and a screen reader will read the name and description when the published SWF file is played.

Accessibility Text

Once you have selected Enable Accessibility, your published Captivate lessons can be read by a screen reader. Screen readers are programs that use auditory feedback to translate screen information to a user. In addition, the screen reader acts as a mouse pointer providing navigation via keyboard commands-the user does not have to select anything. Screen readers typically rely on Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) to distinguish screen elements as a button, dialog box, a link or a menu.

According to Axistive, "the three main screen readers in North America are (in order of market share) JAWS, Window-Eyes and Hal, which together sell around 3,000 (units) yearly."

Here are three quick steps to add Accessibility Text to a Slide:

  1. Right-click a slide and choose Properties
  2. Click the Accessibility button

    The Slide Accessibility Text dialog box will appear. When a screen reader reads this slide, it will only read what it sees in the Slide Accessibility area. It will not read slide captions.

  3. Type the text you'd like the reader to read out loud and click OK (alternatively, you can click the Insert slide text or Insert slide notes button to quickly use existing text as your Slide Accessibility Text)

    Adding Accessibility Text to a Captivate slide

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Need to learn Adobe Captivate 4 fast? Attend a live, 2-day online training class. Click here for more information.
 
Note: Our new Advanced Captivate 4 class is now posted on our Web site. Click here for more information.
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Adobe Acrobat 9: Fix Your Acrobat!

by David R. Mankin  

I've received panicked calls from dozens of Acrobat customers over the years who are certain they broke their installation of Acrobat.

"What is specifically wrong with Acrobat on your machine?" I would ask.

"It doesn't look right," they would say. "There's something missing from the top or the side."

We use programs for hours a day, and click on things over and over again without even knowing what they're called. It's not important to know what something's called to use it effectively, but when you call for tech support, the person who wants to help you needs to know what's broken!

Here are three things that appear to frequently "break" in Acrobat, and aren't really broken at all–they're just hidden and need to be restored.

  • If you are viewing a PDF file, and you don't see the main menu (File, Edit, View, Document, etc.) across the top of your Acrobat interface, you are missing your Menu Bar (that's its official name). The keyboard shortcut used to toggle showing and hiding the Menu Bar is the F9 key. Odds are good that if you press F9, your missing Menu Bar will quickly come back to its rightful place at the top of your Acrobat window.
  • If you attempt to click on a tool like the Save button or the Print button, and there are no tools to be found, you may want to try pressing the F8 on your keyboard (this key is a toggle that shows and hides toolbars).
  • Some folks have been puzzled by missing Navigation Panels, like the Pages Panel, Bookmarks, etc. They don't even see little icons on the left side that, when clicked, spring the panels open. The easy solution to this problem is to press the F4 key on your keyboard (this displays and hides the Navigation Panel).
Knowing the correct terminology and these quick and simple keyboard shortcuts will possibly get you out of trouble, and perhaps make you look like an Acrobat wizard with your colleagues.
 
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Want to learn more about Adobe Acrobat? Attend Dave's live, 2-day online Acrobat class. Click here for more details.
 
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David R. Mankin is a Certified Technical Trainer, desktop publisher, computer graphic artist, and Web page developer. He is an Adobe-Certified Expert in Acrobat.
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Adobe Photoshop CS4: Crop and Straighten

Are you digitizing your paper photographs to preserve them for the future? If not, you should be thinking about it, because our priceless paper photographs are fading and yellowing even as you read this article. Here's a quick tip on scanning multiple images into Photoshop:
  1. Place several of your photos on your scanning bed at one time (make sure they don't overlap)

    Images on a scanner

  2. Choose File > Import and choose your scanner from the list
  3. Follow your scanner's instructions to scan the photos into Photoshop

    Images straightened

  4. Once you are back in Photoshop, choose File > Automate > Crop and Straighten, and let the software create separate image files from the one multiple-image scan!
 
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Want to take a 2-day, live, online Adobe Photoshop with Barb? Click here.
 
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About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers in the world.
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Adobe Captivate 4: Mastering Quiz Navigation Forward and Backward

by Kevin A. Siegel 

If you've added Question Slides to a Captivate simulation, you've likely come across two navigation issues that are tough to resolve. First, you test the quiz and, after answering all the questions, you can't get the pesky quiz to go backwards so you can review the answers. Second, if the project contains interactive objects (like buttons or click boxes), after clicking the object, you can't go back and click the object a second time. Even worse, you often times can't get to the slide at all (even if you click the Rewind button on the playbar). It's maddening I tell you!

There are two main reasons that projects with Question Slides end up with backward movement issues. The first problem you might be able to find and resolve on your own given time… but that second problem isn't so obvious. Read on…

First, if you want your users to be able to go backward and review the Questions in your quiz, you have to enable the backward movement feature.

  1. Choose Quiz > Quiz Preferences

  2. Select Settings from the Quiz category
  3. From the Settings area, select Allow backward movement

    Enable backward movement in quizzes

  4. Click OK 

Okay, so that takes care of the backward movement problem. But what about when users click on a button or click box in your lesson to jump to a slide, and then they can't get back to that slide. What's up with that? The slide in question wasn't a Question Slide. So why can't user's get back to it. The truth is, I see this kind of thing all of the time. And more times than not, here's what you can do to allow backward navigation to slides (specifically when you have slides with interactivity within the same project as Question Slides).

  1. Right-click the interactive object on the slide (click box, button or even a Text Entry box)
  2. On the Reporting tab, ensure none of the options are selected

    Reporting for an object disabled

  3. Click OK

    Believe it or not, this simple step should resolve the issue. Why? If you enable Reporting for an object, the object basically makes its slide a Question Slide, even though the slide is not a traditional Question Slide (it doesn't even look like a Question Slide). Once a user clicks the object, the user has, in effect, answered a question (Reported a result). Once reported, the result can't be reported a second time and navigation backward becomes impossible or clunky (even if Allow backward movement is enabled).

 
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Need to learn Adobe Captivate 4 fast? Attend a live, 2-day online training class. Click here for more information.
 
Note: Our new Advanced Captivate 4 class is now posted on our Web site. Click here for more information.
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Questions of the Week

Adobe Captivate Question: Why Is There a Double-Click?

I am doing a software simulation, demonstrating Adobe InDesign CS4 features.  When I run Captivate and start recording, my mouse starts responding to a single click as if it were a double click.  It does this in InDesign and it does it when I stop recording and return to Captivate 4.0.  I never had this problem with Captivate 3.0.  Restarting the computer doesn't help. Got a solution?

Answer

 
There is no setting in Captivate that will change all of your clicks to a double-click during the recording process (you can control this kind of behavior post-production via the Options tab of a click box).

Are objects opening with a single-click when Captivate isn't recording, or only when you use Captivate. And which version of Windows are you using?

Follow-up

It turns out that this developer had a faulty mouse. After replacing it, Captivate behaved as expected.

 
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Adobe Captivate Question: What's the Best Way to Create a Menu?

How would you create a menu for an existing Captivate 3 project? Everything I have read says use the Menubuilder at the start of the project.

Answer:

You probably wouldn't use MenuBuilder until you were nearly done with all of the Captivate projects. Alternatively, you can add a TOC to your project via the skin. However, the TOC feature in Captivate 3 is not very good (the TOC in Captivate 4 is very good).

If you want to combine several Captivate projects under one umbrella, MenuBuilder is okay. However, I upload my content into an LMS. If you don't have an LMS, you could make a functional TOC in any Web authoring tool (such as Dreamweaver).

 
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Adobe Captivate Question: Can I Capture Student Input?

I want students to be able to fill out their name and employee ID on an initial screen, and then use information on a certificate at the end of the lesson (if students achieve a passing grade).  I do not use a Learning Management System, so the entire project has to be self-contained. Is there anyway to link a field on the certificate page with the data entered on the sign-in page without upgrading to Captivate 4?

Answer:

The feature you're looking for is not available in Captivate 3. However, you can do exactly what you're asking in Captivate 4 via variables and widgets (both are new in that version).

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Got a question you'd like answered? Email me.
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Need a PDF? No Acrobat? No Problem!

by David R. Mankin  

Question: Which Adobe product creates PDFs…  and is FREE?

Free? Is your first instinct to say "Nothing is free"? Hmmm. Adobe Reader is certainly free, but you can't use it to created PDFs.  All versions of Acrobat 9 facilitate PDF creation in a variety of methods–but they are definitely NOT free!

The answer is not on your computer, but rather in the clouds. Clouds? Specifically, Adobe is now providing online services via Acrobat.com, a suite of free Web-based utilities. To use them, you need only to sign up for the service–provide a user name and a password and you're in! You get two gigabytes of storage, file sharing, online conferencing (Adobe ConnectNow), a word processor (called Buzzword), and the ability to create PDFs.

Acrobat.com

When you log on to Acrobat.com, you will notice that the service is still referred to as 'beta,' but I believe the fact that there is an 'Upload to Acrobat.com' button in Acrobat 9 indicates that Acrobat.com is not going anywhere.

There are a few limits to the free service. First, your ConnectNow conferences are limited to three participants. Second, as I mentioned earlier, your file storage has a two gigabyte limit. You can only create five PDF files online, and if you want bigger conferences, you'll have to buy Acrobat Connect Pro. (If you need to make lots of PDF files, you should buy Acrobat 9.)

You can use Acrobat.com to create PDFs from any of the following types of files: Microsoft Word (DOC), Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT), Microsoft Excel (XLS), text (TXT), Adobe PostScript (PS), image (bitmap, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG), Corel WordPerfect (WPD), and OpenOffice and StarOffice presentation, spreadsheet, graphic, and document files (ODT, ODP, ODS, ODG, ODF, SXW, SXI, SXC, SXD, STW).

Making free PDFs with Acrobat.com 

If you decide Acrobat.com is a service you would likely use often, you may want to download the desktop version of Acrobat.com (a smooth Adobe AIR application that has all the functionality you'd expect without having to launch a browser). This app can be minimized to your Windows tray, or shown as a cool little desktop widget.

Acrobat.com Air application

If you find yourself with a borrowed laptop, or sitting at someone else's computer, and you need to make a PDF file, Acrobat.com can come to the rescue!

 
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Want to learn more about Adobe Acrobat? Attend Dave's live, 2-day online Acrobat class. Click here for more details.
 
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David R. Mankin is a Certified Technical Trainer, desktop publisher, computer graphic artist, and Web page developer. He is an Adobe-Certified Expert in Acrobat.