Category: Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite

by Kevin Siegel

I often hear from Captivate developers who are required to output smaller and smaller SWFs, while making their lessons more and more interactive. Fortunately, adding interactivity to a lesson does not negatively impact the size of the published SWF. Rather, imported assets such as audio, video and images are the main culprits behind SWF bloat.

There are some things that you can do while working in Captivate that may lower the size of the published SWF. Here are a few of my favorites:

Shorten the Lesson

Ideally, none of your lessons (modules) play for more than 5 minutes. However, if you can trim the lesson down to 2-3 minutes of playtime, you'll save on SWF file size. More, but smaller lessons are better than fewer, larger lessons. As a bonus to smaller SWFs, shorter lessons will allow your learners to move through the modules fast–something that all eLearning developers should make a priority.

Use Fewer Slides

Keep the number of slides in your Captivate project as low as possible. Simply put, the more slides in your lesson, the larger the published lesson will be, especially if your lessons are larger (a large width and/or height) and you captured pixel-heavy backgrounds.

Use Less Audio

I'm a huge fan of adding audio effects and voiceover audio to a lesson. However, nothing will bloat a published SWF quite like audio. If you need to use audio, check out the next section.

Use a Lower Audio Bitrate

The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality of your audio. However, since most people will be consuming your published content using a system with something less than high fidelity audio capabilities, consider a bitrate of 64kbps or lower.

Loop Background Audio

If you are going to include background audio, use a tiny portion of the audio file. During the import process, you can elect to loop the audio. The smaller the portion of the background audio used, the smaller the published lesson will be.

Avoid Animations

Adding animations to your lessons is a great idea. However, since the animations will be embedded within the published SWF, they will cause the SWF to bloat.

Avoid FMRs

Full Motion Recordings (FMRs) are videos created by Captivate when you drag your mouse during the recording process. Since FMRs are videos, they'll bloat your published SWF.

Externalize Resources

By default, your Skin, Widgets, FMRs and Animations are embedded in the published SWF. If you externalize them, the published SWF will be much smaller. However, you will now have to keep track of the resources and ensure they are stored in the same folder as the main SWF or they won't appear in your published lesson. You'll find the option to Externalize Resources by choosing File > Publish Settings.

Lower the Size of the SWF During the Publish Process

Earlier I suggested that you avoid or limit the use of audio, FMRs and use as few slides as possible. It's highly unlikely that you will be able to avoid those kind of resources completely (or at all). In that case, you can lower the size of the SWF when you publish.

1. Choose File > Publish Settings and select SWF Size and Quality. Select Compress Full Motion Recording SWF file to compress any SWFs in your lesson.
2. Drag the slider in the Settings area from High down to Medium or Low. As you do, notice that your Slide Quality Settings will lower to Low(8 bit), your audio quality will lower and the quality of the Jpeg images used in your lesson will lower.

   

Note: The lower you drag the Settings slider, the more your SWF will compress. However, the lower you go, the more you run the risk of altering the quality of the lesson's assets so much that the appearance of your lessons will suffer negatively. You can also drag the slider down to Custom and manually set the options for your lesson's resources.

The suggestions above aren't an exhaustive list of possibilities when it comes to lowering the size of your SWF. If you've got some sure-fire techniques to lower the size of your published SWF, feel free to send it to me. I'm happy to post your suggestions here in a future issue.

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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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by Kevin Siegel

Changing the font size of selected text is a simple thing to accomplish in Captivate. All you need to do is select a text caption (or highlight some text within a text caption). On the Properties panel, Character group, type the desired font size and press [Enter] on your keyboard.

Have you noticed what's missing on the Character group? It appears that you cannot select a font size from a drop-down menu like you can in most other applications.

But looks can be deceiving. While there isn't a traditional font-size drop-down menu, you can in fact scroll through a list of font sizes.

With a text caption selected, move your mouse pointer over the current font Size on the Properties panel (Character group). Don't click inside the Size field… just move your mouse pointer over the field.

Notice that your mouse pointer becomes a hand-mouse pointer and a horizontal arrow. 

With your mouse pointer looking like the image above, drag your mouse right to see larger font sizes; drag your mouse left to see smaller font sizes.

As you drag left or right, the font size will increase or decrease by one point. If you want to use a specific font size, simply stop dragging once the size appears and release the mouse clicker.

Note: The largest font size in Captivate is 720 points; the smallest font size is 1 point.

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by Kevin Siegel

In the image below, I've drawn two objects on a Captivate slide. Clearly the object on the left is much larger than the one on the right. I'd like both objects to be the same size. In fact, I'd like the smaller object to grow larger to match the size of the object at the left.

While it might be tempting to delete the image on the right and simply duplicate the existing object, there is a little-used option in Captivate that I'd like to share.

Select the objects you'd like to be the same size and choose Modify > Align > Resize to the same size.

And bam… you get this:

What's that you say… you got this?

Take a look at the very first image above and notice that the object on the left has white resizing handles. In the image directly above, the object on the right has the white resizing handles.

When aligning or resizing multiple slide objects, the object you select first becomes the anchor. The anchor will neither move nor resize when you apply Captivate's align and/or resize commands. In the first image, the object on the left is the anchor; in the image above, the object on the right is the anchor.

Spend some time with Captivate's align and resize commands (via the Modify menu or by right-clicking. Among the standard align and resize options, you'll also find some handy slide-alignment options. These options can prove handy should you want, for instance, selected objects to be perfectly centered on a slide.

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by Kevin Siegel

You may have noticed that Captivate 5.5 allows you to quickly change the angle of a slide object by dragging the free-rotate icon you will find just above any selected object.

While rotating an object is great, getting rid of the rotation can get a bit sticky if you try to use the free-rotate icon. Most people will nearly remove the rotation, but are surprised to find that a slight angle remains.

There are two painless ways to remove the rotation (the Angle). First, with the rotated object selected, expand the Transform group on the Properties panel and change the Angle to 0.

Sure, using the Angle field on the Transform group is easy. But I am always looking for easier. Select a rotated object and, instead of dragging the free-rotate icon at the top of the object… double-click it. And bam! That Angle is instantly reset to 0. No dragging. No typing. Just a simple double-click and done.

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