Adobe Captivate 3: Publishing a Single SWF with a Skin Playbar

by Kevin A. Siegel

If you intend to import your published Captivate lessons into FrameMaker or RoboHelp, you will likely find yourself in a pickle if your Captivate lesson includes a skin with a playbar. When you import the main SWF into FrameMaker or RoboHelp, you won't see the playbar.

 

You could always solve the problem by not using a skin at all--you could use a BMP playbar. In that case, assuming you publish as a SWF, and don't include the HTML file, you will end up with a single SWF that you could import. However, the problem with BMP playbars is... well, they're BMP playbars. Besides not looking as good as Skin playbars, BMP playbars occupy space on your slides, often covering important areas of the lesson.

 

If you'd like to keep the Skin playbar, and still publish just a single SWF, read on.

1. Open a Captivate project and rename it (some of the steps below cannot be undone... if you don't like the results, you'll need a backup of your project to start over)
   
   
2. Choose Project > Skin
   
   
3. On the Playback Control tab, select a skin from the Skin drop-down menu
   
   
4. Still on the Playback Control tab, select the Bottom Position
   
   
   
   
5. On the Borders tab, deselect Show Borders (remove the check mark from the box)
   
   
   
   
6. Click OK
   
   
7. Choose Project > Resize Project
   
   
8. Remove the check mark from Maintain aspect ratio
   
   
9. Increase the project's Height by 32 pixels (this will leave room for your playbar at the bottom of your published SWF)
   
   
10. From the If new size is larger area, select Keep project the same size and fill background with color
    
    
11. If necessary, change the Background color to White
    
    
12. If necessary, select Top Center from the Position project drop-down menu
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
13. Click Finish
    
14. You will be alerted that you cannot undo your changes... click Yes
    
    
15. Choose File > Publish
    
    
16. Select Flash (SWF) from the Publish options at the left of the dialog box
    
    
17. From the Folder area, select a publish destination
    
    
    
    
18. From the Output Options area, deselect Export HTML (click OK when you are warned that your project may not display correctly in a Web browser)
    
    
    
    
19. Click Publish

If you were to browse to the folder containing your published project, you would see that just one SWF has been published.

 

 

Import the SWF into RoboHelp or FrameMaker, or open the SWF with a Web browser, and you'll see that the SWF includes the Skin's playbar--even though there isn't a Skin SWF.

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Do you have a Captivate production problem that's making you pull your hair out? Email your problem and let others learn solutions from your experience.

 

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Want to learn more about Adobe Captivate 3? Click here.

Comments

[a]

This doesn't seem to work with Captivate 3

[vin]

followed this step by step exactly...still outputs tons of swf files. my project has 49 slides and the number of output swf files always seems to be 49. Do i need to merge them all into one slide somehow?

[Talah]

Worked great for me in Captivate 3.0.0. Thanks for the info!

[Elaine]

Thank you so much! I was struggling with this for so long!