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In the coming weeks we’ll be offering advanced online courses on Adobe Captivate 2. If you have something you would like to see covered in the course, please let us know by clicking here.
The one-day course will be held online in a virtual classroom. Stay tuned to this newsletter for more details.
I recently heard a couple of Captivate developers complaining about how hard it was to work with long Captivate captions because of all the scrolling up and down it takes to read through them via the caption properties dialog box.
Suddenly, and without much warning, I was dragged into the debate. They asked me if there was an easier way to work with captions in Captivate. When I suggested that short captions were better than long captions, which would end the debate, I was greeted with something less than enthusiasm. “No,” I was told, the caption length had been dictated by the client and the length could not be changed. Besides, if the caption was short, but the font size large, you’d still have to scroll up and/or down to edit the text. Hmmmm.
When I suggested that it was a good practice to export the captions into Word and work with them there (performing a round-trip back to Word if edits were necessary), I was greeted with: “That’s all well and good, but wouldn’t it be nice if it was easier to work with the captions while in Captivate.”
One of my developers, Anne Nolan, offers up the following cool trick that she had found accidentally while working inside a Captivate caption.
I’ll admit right now that while I consider myself something of an authority on Captivate, I had no idea Captivate could do Ms. Nolan’s trick. It just goes to show that if you think you know it all, the Ms. Nolan’s of the world will be happy to put you in your place. Well done, Ms. Nolan. (Note: You’ll need a mouse with a scroll wheel to try this trick at home.)
You’re not seeing things. If you keep the left clicker down and roll the scroll wheel up an down, you’ll see the caption text zooming in and out. How cool is that?
Do you have any Captivate tricks up your sleeve? Please share. I’m happy to give you full credit right here.
An inherent weakness in HTML is the inability to position page elements exactly where you want them. To counter this failing, one often-used trick is to use tables. You put an element into a table cell, add columns and rows to add spacing, turn off the cell borders and, presto, a page layout that looks just about the way you want.
In RoboHelp, you can use Positioned Text Boxes. They can contain text and/or graphics and can be “positioned” exactly where you want them on the page. When previewed with a browser, the position of the box will not change.
Using Positioned Text Boxes, you can create complex page layouts similar to those you would have had to create in desktop publishing programs such as PageMaker, QuarkXPress and InDesign.
To add a positioned text box:
That’s it. Go ahead and give it a try!
Believe it or not, you can perform complex data merges in InDesign CS 2 that allow you to create form letters, certificates, envelopes and mailing labels out of raw data.
Click here to interact with an online simulation that will teach you how. Or, read the steps to success below:
A data merge consists of three parts: a data document, a target document and a merged document.
The data document contains the information that changes from document to document. For instance, if you wanted to create certificates, the names you want to appear on each certificate would be typed into the data document.
The process for creating a data merge in InDesign is surprisingly simple. First, create the data. You can use just about anything to create the data. But if you want an easy test document, type the data in a word processor like NotePad. Separate the data by pressing the TAB key on your keyboard. Keep in mind that the first row of your data will become the HEADER row in your data and will translate into Data Fields in InDesign.
After you finish creating the data document, start InDesign and create a target document. You create the target document in InDesign as you would create any InDesign document–except you add data-field placeholders that will serve as a conduit between the InDesign document and the data document.
After creating the target document in InDesign, it’s a simple matter of merging the data document with the target document. Really!
The Data Merge palette opens. This is where you select the data document file as your data source.
As mentioned earlier, the items in the first row of the data document appear in the Data Merge palette as data fields. Now you will add the data fields to the InDesign document.
All you need to do now is merge the document.
A new, merged document will be created that is a merge between the data in your data document and the InDesign target document.
Still don’t believe it’s easy to create a data merge in InDesign? Seeing is believing! Click here to interact with an online simulation and I bet you will soon be convinced. Don’t worry, the price is right. It’s free.
The word only is often misplaced. It sounds natural almost anywhere in the sentence, but for the meaning of the sentence to be clear, only should be placed as close as possible to what it modifies. The word only can be used as an adverb or as an adjective and usually precedes the word it is modifying. Some other words that are often misplaced are almost, just, and merely.
Click here to learn more about grammar.
RoboHelp 6 now comes with the ability to create and use variables. What are variables and how can they help you? Variables can contain information that occurs frequently in your project, such as a product name, company name or copyright notice.
After creating the variable, you can insert it into any RoboHelp project or onto a template by dragging and dropping.
Let’s say you want to have your company name appear throughout the project. You could accomplish the task the old-fashioned way by typing the company name over and over again. Or you can create a variable called CompanyName, whose definition is your actual company name. After creating the variable, it’s a simple matter of dragging the CompanyName variable into any topic.
Now here’s the cool part. Assume your company name now appears throughout your project, and now you want to change it. Without the variable, you would have to use RoboHelp’s Multi-File Find and Replace tool to update the company name. Thanks to variables, all you actually need to do is update the definition of the CompanyName variable and you will change the displayed company name project-wide in just a few seconds. Sweet!
Create a User Defined Variable
Insert and Edit a User Defined Variable
When you drag the variable into a topic, the Variable Value appears. Should you update the variable at any time, it will update all instances of itself throughout the project.
Liberate Your Projects: Go Skinless
As I’ve mentioned in previous editions of this newsletter, Adobe Captivate 2 creates at least four output files when you publish your projects (1 HTML, 2 SWFs and 1 JavaScript).
I recently had a student who wanted to eliminate the second SWF. While it’s possible to eliminate the second skin entirely, there isn’t an obvious way to do so.
Here’s how:
When you publish your next SWF, you’ll end up with three files instead of four: 1 HTML, 1 SWF and 1 JavaScript.
Gas-X’s Got Nothing on this Bloat-Relief Technique
I found myself working recently in a Captivate project that seemed to get larger and larger, even as I deleted assets. For instance, a 95-slide project was a bloated 41mb. After deleting several slides and several audio clips, the file-size actually increased to 45mb. Huh?
After displaying the Library and using the Select Unused Items tool, and then deleting the unused items, my file size dropped a "whopping" 1mb. So here I am, staring at a 44mb file. What to do?
Follow these steps and you should see a significant reduction in your project’s file size:
Bam! During a recent test I saw my 44mb file drop down to 3mb.
Oh what a relief it is!
Verbals are words that are derived from verbs but function as another part of speech. We have three types of verbals in our language: participles, infinitives, and gerunds.
Participle: adjective. Ends in –ing in the present (walking, running) and in –ed or an irregular ending in the past participle (walked, run).
Infinitive: noun, adjective, or adverb. The word to precedes the dictionary form (to walk, to run).
Gerund: noun. Always ends in an –ing (walking, running).
Since both participles and gerunds can end in – ing, you have to know whether the verbal is functioning as a noun or as an adjective.
Examples of Verbals
Want to learn more? Click here.
Flash uses two primary types of graphics—vector graphics and raster (bitmap) graphics. Although Flash is primarily a vector-based tool, sometimes one image type is better than the other.
Raster graphics include the Windows Bitmap format (BMP) as well as JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, PICT and others. Raster graphics use pixels to determine the location type of each piece of color information. While bitmap images are great for high quality images, such as photographs, they can be very large (in file size), which can be problematic when used on Web pages. If not compressed, a large bitmap can take forever to download on the Web. A solution to the large bitmap file size is compression. But bitmap images tend to lose quality when scaled to a higher size.
Vector images use mathematical values to reproduce the appropriate display and can, therefore, be scaled without distortion. As a result, the file size of vector images such as EPS, Adobe Illustrator (AI), Macromedia Freehand (FH8 or FH9) and others are significantly smaller than bitmaps. Unfortunately, vector images can be demanding of a computer’s processor and generally do not reproduce high-quality details without a significantly larger file size.
Click here to learn more about Flash Basic 8.
RoboHelp 6 HTML now ships with a tool called RoboScreenCapture. The new tool, which can be accessed via the Tools panel, allows you to capture screen shots just like programs such as SnagIt and FullShot. (The big benefit to using RoboScreenCapture is that you won’t have to buy those other tools.)
Here are some of the features you will find in RoboScreenCapture:
Here’s how you can use RoboScreenCapture to capture an image to the clipboard and paste it into a RoboHelp 6 project.
The captured window appears in the RoboScreenCapture editing area, and the capture is on your clipboard.
The screen shot you created appears in the topic.