ADOBE CAPTIVATE: The Fix for Corrupt Themes

While attempting to apply a Theme to a Captivate project I received the alert shown below. 

 

My only option was to click the OK button and try again. Of course, no matter how many times I attempted the task, I received the same failure message.

 

When Captivate misbehaves, the first thing I always attempt is to reset the program’s Preferences. There’s a handy utility for this located in the program’s application folder within a subfolder called Utils. With Captivate closed, browse to the Utils folder and open CleanPreferences (there’s a version for the Mac and PC). 

 

Upon restarting Captivate, the cleaned Preferences file usually puts Captivate back in working order.

 

If resetting the Preferences file doesn’t work, plan B is to clear Captivate’s Cache folder. This option is found by opening Captivate’s Preferences dialog box (Edit menu for PC users; Adobe Captivate menu for Mac users) and, from the General Settings category, click the Clear Cache button.

 

Every once in a while, one or more of the theme files (they are .cptm files) get corrupt. When that happens, Captivate simply refuses to apply the themes and you’ll get the "Cannot apply…" error message shown in the first image above. While I cannot help you prevent corrupt theme files (if I find out what causes the corruption, I’ll be sure to share), I can show you how to replace the corrupt theme files with new files

 

First, with Captivate closed, go to Users > Public > Public Documents > Adobe > eLearning Assets > Layouts > 11_0. Copy the en_US folder and paste it in another location on your computer (this is going to be a backup copy of the en_US folder's contents, so I suggest giving it a name such as en_US_bk).

 

With Captivate still closed, go to Documents > My Adobe Captivate Projects > Layouts > 11.0 > en_US. Select and copy all of the .cptm files in the en_US folder.

 

Go back to Users > Public > Public Documents > Adobe > eLearning Assets > Layouts > 11.0 and open the en_US folder (this is the folder you backed up a moment ago).

 

Paste the .cptm files on your clipboard into this folder (replace the existing .cptm files when prompted). Restart Captivate and you’ll be able to apply the supplied Themes as before.

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