Month: June 2011

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Adobe Captivate 5.5 Question: Will You Be Updating Your Books?

Question: I'm a certified Captivate trainer who uses your books when I teach. Now that Adobe has officially released Captivate version 5.5, will you be updating your books to include the new features?

Answer: The new features in Captivate 5.5 are wonderful, but there are only a handful of them. The interface between Captivate 5 and 5.5 is nearly identical (with the exception of some additional groups on the Properties panel, a few extra menu items, and the renaming of some items). Since the new features don't affect the lessons in either of my Captivate books, I am not planning on publishing new 5.5 versions of my Captivate books at this time. However, while I'm not adding the new features to the books, I am writing about the new features on this blog (search for Captivate 5.5). I have also posted an errata sheet for the essentials book. The sheet details the differences between version 5.0 and 5.5 that affect lessons presented in the book.

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Question about eLearning Fonts: Arial or Verdana?

Question: I like Verdana but I have no idea why or if there is a justifiable reason why one should use Verdana over another sans serif like Arial. The government discusses the issue in the guide here. They make no distinction for web designers only that you should use a common font like Arial, Helvetica or Verdana. Do you folks have a defensible preference?

Answer: It is widely agreed that Arial, being a printer font, is harder to read on screen than Verdana, which was designed to be viewed on a computer screen. Having said that, both Arial and Verdana are easier to read on a display than Times New Roman. That's why Verdana is the most popular font and used by web developers all over the world. You might find the "In Fonts We Trust" article that AJ wrote last year interesting. It deals specifically with font usage and readability.

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Adobe Captivate: User’s Minimum Requirement for Opening PDFs?

Captivate Question Received via Email: What Is the Minimum Requirement for Opening PDFs?

I'm planning to use Captivate's ability to publish PDFs and deliver those PDFs to my users. What is the minimum Adobe Reader version my users will need to open the PDF? And will they also need the Flash Player?

Answer: Your users will need the free Adobe Reader 9 or newer. And since the newer Readers also include the Flash Player, your users will not need the Flash Player on their systems to open your Captivate PDFs and enjoy the video content. For that reason, I'm seeing more and more people deploy PDFs to users instead of SWFs.

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Adobe Captivate 5.5: Round and Round We Go…

by Kevin Siegel Follow us on Twitter View our profile on LinkedIn

One of the shortcomings with working with objects in Adobe Captivate has always been the inability to control the rotation of a selected object. Beginning with Captivate 5, you could flip or rotate an image via the Properties panel. In fact, there are four tools in Captivate 5 and 5.5 allowing you to flip an image horizontally or vertically, as well as rotate right or left.

Captivate's flip and rotate tools.

In Captivate 5, you couldn't grab hold of an image and give it a good spin. And you couldn't rotate text captions at all. However, with Captivate 5.5, you are free to rotate objects to your heart's content. Select a slide object and you'll notice a free-rotate icon at the top of the object.

Captivate 5.5 Free Rotate

Drag that icon and you can rotate the object to any rotation angle you need.

Free rotate

If dragging the free rotate icon simply isn't your cup of tea, you'll be happy to learn that you will also find an Angle field on the Transform panel.

Transform Panel

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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate? We offer Beginner and Advanced classes. Both Windows and Macintosh developers can attend these classes.
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eLearning: YouTube Adds Creative Commons Content

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

 

I have recently written a couple articles in response to the many questions I receive about whether or not using content found on YouTube is a violation of copyright. 

 

In one article I spoke with a lawyer about his views on using material found on Youtube. In another I provided some resources for deciding whether or not the content you would like to use can be used legally.

 

Last week, YouTube took a pretty big step in helping address copyright concerns with the introduction of Creative Commons content to its internal video editor. This new feature provides users with more content that can be used without fear of copyright infringement.

 

YouTube Video Editor 

 

YouTubers are now able to access thousands of Creative Commons (CC) videos which are easily searchable from within the video editor tool. Those with videos on YouTube can contribute to the community by marking their own content as CC. 

 

From the YouTube Creative Commons page:

 

 

By marking your original video with a Creative Commons license, you are granting the entire YouTube community the right to reuse and edit that video. Please understand that you may ONLY mark your uploaded video with a Creative Commons license if it consists ENTIRELY of content licensable by you under the CC-BY license.

 

Some examples of such licensable content are: 

  • Your entirely originally created content
  • Other videos marked with a CC-BY license
  • Videos in the public domain

The YouTube video editor will also automatically link to the original content for you so you don't have to worry about giving proper credit. The tool is still a bit rudimentary, but is great for simple video editing and should clean up a lot of accidental copyright infringements.  

 

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Communicator and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."

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The eLearning Developers Conference

Salt Lake City, June 15-17

I'll be teaching three sessions (2, full-day pre-conference workshops on Adobe Captivate and a 60-minute session on integrating eLearning with Adobe RoboHelp) at this years eLearning DevCon in Salt Lake City.

Given its small, intimate sessions and its location (held on the campus of The University of Utah campus), the eLearning DevCon conference is one of my favorite conferences. I hope to run into some of you there.

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PowerPoint: Measurement Conversion

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

 

I was recently asked if it was possible to change the measurement system in PowerPoint from inches to pixels. The answer is no… at least not from within PowerPoint. (More on that later.) Simply put, you are stuck with PowerPoint's default measurement system, which is inches. 

 

I started to think about why someone would want to change PowerPoint's measurement system. As I said, PowerPoint's default system is inches, which makes sense. PowerPoint is designed to build presentations that will be shown on myriad display types and sizes. Since the size of the display isn't always known to the person running the presentation, it doesn't make sense to preset the PowerPoint presentation to a specific number of pixels.

 

While many people think that inches, points and pixels are interchangeable measurement systems, they aren't. A pixel is actually the smallest visual element on a video display screen.  

 

I frequently use PowerPoint to design graphics. My clients often work in pixels rather than inches. When the client asks for my images to be delivered in a specific pixel size, I use online pixel-to-inch converters to convert the PowerPoint graphics from inches to pixels. While converting pixels to inches isn't always an exact science, I can usually get things sized to meet the client's needs.

 

Working in pixels may not be possible in PowerPoint, but working in centimeters is another story, and it's a fairly easy task to accomplish. However, the process of changing the measurement system from inches to centimeters has nothing to do with PowerPoint and everything to do with your computer's settings.

 

Note: The steps for changing your computer to display in centimeters varies slightly between Windows 7, Vista, and XP. However, the same general principles apply.

  1. Ensure all applications are closed.
  2. Click the Start button and open the Control Panel.
  3. Select Clock, Language, and Region (Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options if you are using XP).
  4. Select Region and Language in Windows 7. (In Vista you will click Region and Language Options and skip to step 6. In XP you will click Change the date, time, or number format from the Regional and Language Options area and skip to step 7.)
  5. From the Region and Language dialog box, ensure the Formats tab is selected, click the Additional Settings button and then skip to step 8.
  6. From the Regional and Language Options dialog box, ensure the Formats tab is selected, click the Customize this format button and then skip to step 8.
  7. From the Regional and Language Options dialog box, ensure the Regional Options tab is selected and click the Customize button.
  8. From the Customize Regional Options dialog box, ensure the Numbers tab is selected and, from the Measurement system drop down menu, select Metric.
  9. Click OK.

The next time you start PowerPoint, your units of measurement should now be in centimeters. If this is for a one-off project, it may be a good idea to go back into your settings when you're done and change them back to US measurements before you forget. 

 

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Communicator and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."

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Writing & Grammar: Department of Redundancy Department

by Jennie Ruby

How many redundancies can you spot in the paragraph below? 

 

You walk up to an ATM machine and enter your PIN number. While you are there, you print out a hard copy of your statement so you can check on the past history of your account. The reason you need a printout is because your total balance seems too high, and you want to make absolutely certain your rent check has cleared.

 

Some of the redundancies may be obvious, but others have become such habitual usage that it sounds funny to us to eliminate them. Redundant expressions may occur partly because we want to make sure we are understood. If our reader could miss one word, we add a second as a backup. Others probably occur because we have forgotten what an acronym stands for, or we have forgotten what we said earlier in the sentence.

 

As the classic book on writing style, Strunk & White says: "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence must have no unnecessary words; a paragraph, no unnecessary sentences." But should redundancies always be eliminated? We would love to hear your thoughts on that question.

Plus, send in a list of the redundancies in the ATM paragraph above, along with a rewrite of the paragraph. Winning entries will be announced next week.

 

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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. She is a publishing professional with more than 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.