Adobe Captivate 4: If You Draw It, They Will Come

by Kevin A. Siegel

 

For the first time in Captivate history, if you need to create objects such as lines (with or without arrow heads), circles, rectangles or complex shapes such as polygons, there is no need to leave Captivate. Now if you find yourself in need of an oval, you can create one using Captivate's Drawing Objects menu or Drawing toolbar to quickly add these kinds of objects to a slide.

 

Here's how you use the tools on the new Drawing toolbar:

1. Open or create a Captivate 4 project
   
   
2. Choose Window > Toolbars > Drawing
   
   The Drawing toolbar will appear.
   
   
   
   
3. To draw a line, you need only select the Line tool and draw on the slide like you would in any graphics program
   
   
4. To add an arrowhead to the line, right-click the line and choose Properties. There are options on the Line tab to set the Line color, Stroke style, Stroke width and even areas for controlling the Start and End shape for the line (nice).
   
   
   
   
5. The slickest tool on the Drawing toolbar is likely the Freeform Polygon tool
   
   
   
   Select the tool and draw any shape you can imagine (click, point, click, point and when you're ready to close the shape, double-click).
   
   But here's the slick part: right-click the shape and you can choose Edit Points, allowing you to quickly reshape the object.
   
   But wait, there's more: right-click the shape again and choose Add Text. And bam, you're basically talking about the ability to create custom text captions.
   
   

 

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Need to learn Adobe Captivate 3? Click here.

 

Need to learn Adobe Captivate 4? Click here.