by Kevin Siegel
If you've spent any time within the
Publish dialog box of Captivate 4, you have probably noticed that there
is a PDF option. Selecting this option will create a PDF version of your
project without the need to use Adobe Acrobat… cool. Because Acrobat Reader 9
includes the Flash Player, anyone who has Reader 9 on their system will
be able to open the PDF and watch or interact with your eLearning
lesson. Cooler!
behave a little differently than PDFs you create from a print document.
If your Captivate lesson contained 50 slides, the resulting PDF you
Publish with Captivate won't contain 50 PDF document pages. Instead, the
PDF will contain a single video. Customer's will be able to watch the
video easily enough and use the Captivate playbar to move through the
lesson. However, printing the PDF becomes a challenge. Customer's will
only be able to print the slides contained in the PDF one slide at a time… they'll need to
pause the lesson and print. There is no way to print all of the slides
at one time (even if they select the Print All option in the Print
dialog box, only
one slide will print). Ouch!
You can get around this limitation
easily enough however by adding a widget to the Captivate project prior
to publishing. Here's how to do it.
- Back in the Captivate project, open a slide for editing (if
you want the print icon to appear on every slide, you should insert the
widget on the first slide). - Choose Insert > Widget.
- Open
PrintSlides.swf from the
Captivate Widget folder (the PrintSlides.swf comes free with Captivate 4
and is typically found in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate
4\Gallery\Widgets).
- Position the widget
on your slide wherever you'd like. - Ensure the widget is
in front of all other slide objects by choosing Edit > Order > Bring to Front
(this step is a requirement of the widget… if the widget isn't in
front of other objects, customers might not be able to click it while in
the PDF). - If you'd like the Widget to appear on all of
the slides, show the Properties of the Widget and, on the Options tab,
Display for Timing to Rest of project.
- Publish the project
(File > Publish) and ensure
the Export PDF Option is
selected.
- Open the PDF that
you published. - Click the printer icon you see on the
slide.
- A dialog box will
appear. All you'll need to do now is select the slides you want to print
and click the Print button.
Join me in May for training on Adobe Captivate. I'm teaching
two classes (Beginner and Advanced). Click here for details on
the Beginner class. Click here for details on
the Advanced class.
***
In Captivate 5 you can ‘print’ projects – which actually means, in Captivate speak, publish them into an MSWord document. One slide per page, with the slide shown in a picture, the objects on the slide shown optionally. There’s also an option to have any caption text shown below the slide. Good option for printing hard copies.
In Captivate 5 you can ‘print’ projects – which actually means, in Captivate speak, publish them into an MSWord document. One slide per page, with the slide shown in a picture, the objects on the slide shown optionally. There’s also an option to have any caption text shown below the slide. Good option for printing hard copies.
In Captivate 5 you can ‘print’ projects – which actually means, in Captivate speak, publish them into an MSWord document. One slide per page, with the slide shown in a picture, the objects on the slide shown optionally. There’s also an option to have any caption text shown below the slide. Good option for printing hard copies.