Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite – Page 18

April 17, 2012

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Wacky Shapes Rule

by Kevin Siegel

Captivate ships with a set number of Caption types. If you're a graphic designer (or know someone who is), you can always create more Caption types. However, the process of creating a custom Caption type can be a bit tedious.

As an alternative, you'll be happy to learn that you can get as wacky as you want when it comes to Text Captions, and you don't have to go to the trouble of creating a Caption type.

To begin, use the Object Toolbar to insert a Polygon, Circle or Rectangle on a slide. (To draw a Polygon, select the tool and click once each time you want to add a section. When finished, click at the beginning, or double-click, to close the shape.)

Drawing tools in Capitvate.

Once you've drawn the shape, choose Edit > Add Text. You'll notice that there's an insertion point within the shape. At this point, you can add text just like you can within a Text Caption. And you can use the Properties panel to format the text as necessary.

Three shapes, all containing text.

If you've drawn a Polygon shape and you're unhappy with the shape, simply choose Edit > Edit Points. You'll then be able to reshape the Polygon in all sorts of wacky ways.

Edit the points on a polygon.

Note: The only shape that will not accept text is a Line.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

April 10, 2012

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Join Objects in a Snap

by Kevin Siegel

If you've ever tried to draw a line between two objects (so you could join them to show a relationship between one object and the next), you'll appreciate Captivate's Snap to Object feature.

In the image below, I've drawn two simple shapes on a Captivate slide. Next, I'd like to draw a diagonal line between the two boxes.

Two boxes I'd like to join using a line.

In the image below, I've drawn the line using Captivate's Line tool. However, I wasn't quite perfect when I released my mouse and the line ended up being a bit too long. Certainly it would be easy enough resize the line at this point, but I'd like to be a bit more efficient and end up with a perfect object-to-object line the first time. That's where the Snap to Object option will come into play.

Since the Snap to Object feature will only work on new objects as they are being drawn, not on objects that are already on the slide, the first thing I did was delete the original line. Then I chose View > Snap to Object.

Using the Line tool, I drew a new line, starting at the first object and moving diagonally toward the upper left of the second object. This time, as I got close to the second object, a circle appeared over the corner of the second object. (This is a visual indicator telling me that Captivate was ready to snap to the second object.)

All that I needed to do at this point was click my mouse and I had a perfect line between the two objects.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

April 4, 2012

Adobe RoboHelp: Edit Navigation Labels

by Kevin Siegel

Creating a Section 508 Compliant version of a Help System is often a requirement for Help authors. The process involves such things as adding screen tips to images and links, and ensuringSection 508 Compliant Output is selected before you compile the layout.

Enable 508.

When opened in a web browser, the compliant output will look much like the image below:

Hide Navigation

Notice that there is a TOC on the left. At the right, there's a link with the word "Hide." Clicking the word "Hide" simply hides the TOC at the left. (And the word "Hide" changes to "Show.")

Show Navigation

If you'd like to make it a bit more obvious what the "Hide" and "Show" links will do, you can edit the text prior to compiling the layout.

On the Single Source Layouts pod, show the Properties of the compliant layout (you can right-click a layout and choose Properties).

Select the Navigation group from the list of WebHelp settings at the left. From the In Topic Navigation area, click the Editbutton to open the In Topic Navigation Options dialog box.

Edit the text in the Show and Hide fields to suit your needs and then click the OK button.

Edit Show/Hide labels

When you compile (Generate) the layout, your new labels will appear as links at the right of the page.

Edited Show/Hide links.

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Looking to learn Adobe RoboHelp quickly? We offer a live, two-day online class once each month. Worried that your class will cancel? All it takes is a single registration and this class runs, guaranteed.

March 28, 2012

Adobe Captivate: Apply Your Changes

by Kevin Siegel

Over the past several months I've written myriad articles extolling the value of using styles on slide objects (including how to reset them, clone them and how to create styles on the fly).

Have you been a good developer? Are you using Object Styles? I'm going to give each and every one of you the benefit of the doubt… of course you are. But even if you are the most disciplined user of styles, there could be trouble ahead. Since several object properties are not contained within an Object Style, keeping things consistent can still prove challenging… even if you fully utilize styles.

Let's take just one group on the Properties panel as an example. The Transform group (Captivate 5.5) or Position and Size group (Captivate 5) contains options that will not be found in the Object Style Manager when you create or edit a style.

What would happen if you manually used a non-style option on a selected slide object? Here's a scenario: let's say that you want to change the width of a single text caption. That's simple enough to accomplish via the Properties panel (using the Transform/Position and Size group). After changing the width of the caption, you then decide that you want all of the text captions in your project to use the new width. Since the width option isn't something that's part of an Object Style, you'll need to go from slide to slide and manually change the width of every caption. Not very efficient, eh?

Read on…

After manually changing the width of the text caption, ensure the caption is selected and then, go to the Properties panel and on the far right of the group, click the Apply to all button.

Apply to all items of the same type

You will see two choices in the drop-down menu: Apply to all items of this type and Apply to all items of same style. If you choose the former, all text captions in the project will get the new width. Nice! If you choose the latter, only the text captions using the same style as the selected text caption will update. This is a nice option if you only want to change the width of a specific group of captions.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

March 20, 2012

Adobe Captivate: Custom Cursors Anyone?

by Kevin Siegel

A student in a recent online Captivate class asked me if it was possible to create a custom mouse cursor for a Captivate eLearning lesson. Sadly, I had to tell the student that it wasn't possible. It's certainly simple enough to change the appearance of any selected mouse cursor (via the Properties panel), but Captivate is not an image-editing application so you cannot create custom cursor images (cur files).

While you cannot create cursor files (CUR's) within Captivate, you can easily create your own, and you can find a bunch of cursor images on the web. For instance, a quick Google Search took me to RealWord Graphics where I found a Gallery area containing an impressive array of free cursor images. The images can be downloaded and used within a Captivate project. If you aren't happy with the cursor images found in the RealWorld Gallery, they provide a Cursor Editor that allows you to quickly create your own cursor.

Download a Cursor Image From the RealWorld Gallery and Use It Within Captivate

Here's all you need to do if you want to download a CUR file from the RealWord Graphics site.

After accessing the RealWord Graphics site, click the Gallery tab.
Click the cursor image group you'd like to download. (In the image below, I went with a collection of Aqua Green Cursors.)
Click the link below the image preview and save the file to your computer. (The Aqua Green Cursors group that I selected had several similar cursors. I went with Normal.cur.)

Note: Pay particular attention to where you saved the file. You'll be opening the location of the cur file next in Captivate.

From within Captivate, select a mouse pointer on any slide.
On the Properties panel, click the Browse button and open the cur file that you downloaded earlier.

In the image below, notice that the standard mouse pointer has been replaced with my downloaded custom cursor.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

March 15, 2012

Adobe RoboHelp: Synonyms Made Easy

by Kevin Siegel

One of the most often used areas of any Help System is Search. And since Search is created automatically when you generate a layout, there's nothing the RoboHelp author has to do to make Search available for the user.

Search does have one main drawback for the user. If the word the user types in the Search box isn't found within any topics, the Search will fail and nothing will be displayed for the user. A failed Search is a missed opportunity for both you and the user.

Here is an example of how Search could fail. Your company Help System, a Policies guide, includes a topic concerned with contraband substances in the office. The word contraband is contained within the topic so the word will be found if users search for that specific term. However, a user who is curious about contraband substances might elect to search the Help System using another word, such as illicit. Because the wordillicit isn't in the Help System, the Search will fail.

There are a couple of ways to fix the problem. One way would be to add Search terms to the properties of individual topics. Another way, which I'll cover here, is to use RoboHelp's Advanced Settings for Localization to create a synonym (illicit) for contraband.

In RoboHelp, choose File > Project Settings. On the Generaltab, click the Advanced button to open the Advanced Settings for Localization dialog box.

On the Synonyms tab, click the New button. It's now a simple matter of adding the Word and its Synonym. In the image below, I've added illicit as a Synonym for contraband. And since many of my users type the mangers when they really mean managers, I've made a Synonym pairing for those two words.

Creating a synonym.

In the Generated WebHelp layout shown below, notice that I have searched for illicit. While illicit isn't a word in any of the topics in my Help system, the Drug Policy topic was still flagged in a successful search.

Synonym being tested.

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Looking to learn Adobe RoboHelp? We offer a live, online class. In fact, there's a class coming up later this month.

March 13, 2012

Adobe Captivate: Force Re-Publish

by Kevin Siegel

One of the wonderful hidden advantages of using Captivate 5 and 5.5 over older versions of the program is the overall speed of the publishing process.

In legacy versions of Captivate, it could easily take 3-5 minutes to publish a moderately-sized project as a SWF. Make a change to project (even a minor typo fix on a single slide) and you will need to once again wait the entire 3-5 minutes for the publish process to complete. With Captivate 5 (and 5.5), I've seen my publishing wait time lower by as much as 95%. It's a staggering improvement. Kudos to the Adobe engineers for working this out.

But…

I have come across an issue where some of my updated slides didn't show the updates in the published content. I'm not sure why this occurs, but I did find a way to ensure my published lessons always show my edits. When publishing the final version of your lesson, select Force re-publish all the slidesfrom the Advanced Options area in the lower right of the Publish dialog box. With this option selected, the publishing process will take much longer. Nevertheless, all of your edits will make it into the published lesson.

Force re-Publish

I've created thousands of eLearning projects using Captivate (hundred in Captivate 5). During all of that time, I've only had a few slides fail to to show my updates once published. With that in mind, it is not necessary for you to leave the Force re-publish all the slides option selected all the time. Remember, using this option will increase your wait time during the Publish process. However, to be safe, it's a good idea to Force re-publish at least the final version of each lesson.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

March 5, 2012

Adobe Captivate: Create Object Styles on the Fly

by Kevin Siegel

Last week I talked about the importance of saving changes to existing object styles so that you can ensure a consistent appearance of slide objects, project-wide.

I'd like to take that concept one step further. In the image below, the Style being used on all of the text captions in my project is once again the [Default Caption Style].

Style being used on all of the text captions.

Just like last week, I wasn't happy with the font or font size used in any of my project captions. I again selected a caption on one of my slides and made changes usingthe Character group on the Properties panel.

Changes made to a text caption.

As expected, a plus sign appeared to the left of the style name in the Style drop-down menu. As I mentioned last week, the plus sign means that there's a style override that has been applied to the selected slide object.

Last week I showed you that you can simply click the Save changes to Existing Style command to instantly update all of the text captions in a project. From that point forward, the [Default Caption Style] will display the updated formatting.

But that was so last week. This week I'm not satisfied with simply saving my changes. Using that technique, I was able to update my objects to reflect my changes. While that was wonderful, I'm thinking that I won't always want to alter the look of my default styles. Instead, it would be better to create a new object style based on new formatting applied to a single object. And to take things one step further, I'd like to apply the new style to objects project-wide.

What I'm looking to do sounds complicated. But here's a solution that I think you'll agree is super simple.

Instead of clicking the Save changes to Existing Style command, click the Create New Style command (it's the command just to the left of Save changes to Existing Style command).

Create a new object style.

Give the style a name and then click the OK button.

Name the new object style.

The new style will automatically be applied to the selected slide object. To use the new style on objects throughout the project, click the Apply to style to command.

Apply a style in place of other styles.

Lastly, use the drop-down menu to select the style you'd like to replace with the new style. Click the OK button and the change will be just about instant… and project wide.

Select the style to be replaced.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

February 28, 2012

Adobe Captivate: Saving Changes to Object Styles

by Kevin Siegel

Object styles were introduced in Captivate 5. While they aren't necessarily the coolest features in Capitvate, Object styles provide one of the fastest ways to update the look and feel of slide objects project-wide.

As I've continued to teach Captivate to new eLearning developers, one of my challenges is ensuring that object styles are used efficiently. Changing the way a selected object looks is fast and easy via the Properties panel. However, using the Properties panel to change the appearance of a single object can be problematic. For instance, let's assume you are working with a project that contains upwards of 100 text captions. You can update the appearance of a selected text caption with a few clicks on the Properties panel. Unfortunately, you'll quickly discover that the remaining 99 captions have remained unchanged.

In the image below, the Style being used on all of the text captions in my project is the default style called [Default Caption Style].

Style being used on all of the text captions.

I wasn't happy with the font or font size used in any of my project captions. I selected a caption on one of my slides and made changes using the Character group.

Changes made to a text caption.

The change took mere seconds. However, none of the other text captions took the change. In fact, it seemed that Captivate didn't appreciate the manual update on the Properties panel either. Check out the plus sign to the left of the style name in the Style drop-down menu.

The plus sign isn't necessarily good or bad (I guess it depends on if you see the glass half-empty or half-full). The plus sign simply means that the selected object isn't using the original appearance (or intent) of the style. In other words, there's a style override that has been applied to the selected slide object. In this case, since I wanted all of my text captions to look like the one that I had manually formatted, the plus sign was bad.

Fortunately, it's not difficult to turn the chicken into some awesome chicken salad. With the updated text caption still selected, a quick click on the Save changes to Existing Style command instantly updated all of the text captions in my project.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

February 16, 2012

Adobe Captivate: Troubleshooting LMS Woes

by Lori Smith

A Captivate developer created a nifty eLearning lesson complete with a quiz, advanced actions and some nice navigation features. All she needed to do to wrap up the project was get the finished lesson posted to her LMS and ensure it reported correctly. And that, unfortunately, is where she ran into trouble. The lesson simply would not work once posted to the LMS.

The developer contacted me. While I had never used her LMS, I have successfully posted and tested several Captivate lessons to myriad systems. One thing I have learned while working with all of those LMSs… you never know what you're going to run into. And her LMS was a challenge. Round and round we went with different options and ideas, but the pesky lesson would not report properly.

Stymied, I appealed to the Adobe Captivate forum in search of anyone who had successfully dealt with her specific LMS. No immediate luck and I continued to scour other forums while waiting for my post to be answered. During that time, I had my client try different approaches. In the end, we figured it out. Here's what worked: I had the developer take baby steps. First, I had her create a new project that only contained a few slides. Then I had her adjust the reporting settings until it worked with her LMS. Next I had her add a button, and then more interactive objects. And then a quiz. The good news? We got the stripped-down version of the project to work. We used the same settings on the original project and it also worked on her LMS.

As luck would have it, I then received a couple of suggestions in the Adobe forums from Rod Ward. His tips were great–starting with "try a very small, extremely simple lesson and go from there," just as we had been doing. Below is a summary of the points from Rod as well as the things we learned:

Don't wait until the deadline to integrate with your LMS. Do it sooner rather than later. And use a very small project to nail down settings and hopefully minimize integration issues.
Even if your LMS claims to be SCORM 1.2 compliant, you may need to try the 2004 setting to make things work.
Once a simple lesson works, add the features you need, one by one and continue to retest.
Ask your LMS vendor if they have a test portal. This saved us a lot of time in the end instead of having to rely on our LMS contact to upload/install content.
Have a conversation with your LMS vendor to see if they know of any integration tricks with Captivate–ours required the Complete flag, the Pass/Fail status did no good.
If you can, simplify your quiz total by having zero points for each question, but one button at the end with 100 points assigned.
If you have invisible/hidden scoring objects, be aware that they still count in the total points of the lesson.
Even if you don't have a quiz in your lesson, you may need to add a button that reports 100 points to the LMS.
If using the Complete/Incomplete status instead of Pass/Fail, be aware of what "Complete" means. A slide is only considered "Complete" if it runs to its timed end. If a user jumps from a slide using the playbar or a button/clickbox, the slide may not be considered Complete. If you have branching, you may skip slides and thus not 'complete' the whole lesson. You can temporarily turn your TOC (and or regenerate it so it includes ALL slides in the lesson) and run your lesson viewing the fewest slides possible. Use the check marks to see what slides were actually completed and use this percentage (or a tad lower) in the % field.
Be a little wary of Resume Data bookmarking. LMSs support this feature differently. Sometimes utilizing this in the Captivate can cause issues for the LMS. Test it before telling your boss bookmarking can absolutely be done–even if your LMS vendor swears it can.
Captivate will only allow your users to retake a quiz if they still have one or more attempts left on the quiz during a session (and they have not tried to review the quiz or jump outside the quiz at any time). If a user clicks the Review Quiz button or leaves the quiz, the LMS may freeze the current quiz and not allow retakes.
If you are having trouble getting an accurate LMS completion score from a branched course, you might want to try the TickTOC widget. You can read more about it here.
Read and post to the Adobe Captivate forum–it's a wealth of free information.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).