by Kevin Siegel 
So I'm working with a text caption in Adobe Captivate and the font size is 16 points. I'd like the font size to be twice as big. For many developers, figuring out what the font size should be if it's supposed to be twice as big as 16 points is easy… 16×2=32.
What's that you say? Math isn't your friend… not your thing? Most computers on the face of the Earth have a free, built-in calculator. (On Windows XP, choose Start > Run > Calculator. On Windows 7 or Vista, choose Start and type Calculator into the Search box. On the Mac, press [F4] on your keyboard.) And I'm willing to bet that just about every mobile device and tablet you can buy today has a built-in calculator.
Of course, if you use any of the devices mentioned above to calculate a desired font Size, you'll still need to return to Captivate and type the new Size within Captivate.
You can save a bit of time if you let Captivate do the heavy lifting for you. Here's how…
Select a text caption and, on the Character group, highlight the font size in the Size field as if you were going to type in a specific font Size. However, instead of typing in a specific size, use the standard math operators for multiplication, addition, subtraction or division. You'll find that in addition to calculating the math for you, the desired font size will also be applied to the text within the selected caption.
In the image below, I started with a font size of 108 points. My client wanted the font size to be one-third that size. There was simply no way I was going to be able to quickly do the math in my head. (I know, I know… you could easily do the math in your head… but not me.) No worries… it was a simple calculation on Captivate's Properties panel: 108/3 is 36 points.
Go ahead and give it a shot on your own. You'll find that you can use an asterisk for multiplication, a forward slash for division and a plus or minus sign for addition or subtraction.
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