You've produced your Captivate project in record time. The only thing left to do is Publish the project. Anyone who has published a Captivate project knows it is a simple process of choosing
File > Publish and setting the appropriate options. Of course, at some point you do actually need to click the
Publish button. And what happens then? Well, to be honest, after clicking the Publish button, even a quick developer hits the wall. Why? It takes time for Captivate project to publish. How much time? Depending on the amount of memory you have on your system, it could take several minutes.
Adobe ran some time trials on how long it took to publish a large project (254 slides) using Captivate 4. On their test systems, it took just over
1:45 to publish the project. That may not seem like a long time, but that's nearly two minutes of twiddling your thumbs while the project is published. During that time, you cannot do anything in the project. Make a change (even a minor change) and need to republish? Publishing the updated project will take another full 1:45, even if the change you made to the project was minor.
When Adobe created Captivate 5, they wanted to decrease your twiddle time. To that end, Adobe came up with a feature called the
incremental publish engine.
So let's take a look at the publish time in Captivate 5 as compared to Captivate 4. As mentioned above, a large Captivate 4 project (254 slides) took just over 1:45 to publish. The same project was published using Captivate 5. The results? Captivate 5 published the project in
2:05. Yeee hahhh!
Ummm... wait a minute. Thanks to the wonderful incremental publish engine, Captivate 5 is now even slower? I don't know about you but anything that makes me work slower isn't a good thing.
While it appears that the incremental publish engine is a problem, it's actually a wonderful enhancement. While it might take a bit longer to perform an initial publish, republishing the project after you've made changes is going to return some fantastic results.
Remember that it took the same amount of time to republish a project in Captivate 4, even if the changes were minor (1:45). How did Captivate 5 do? Adobe made the minor changes to the version 5 project and republished. Hold on to your hats... it took a mere
6 seconds to publish the changes (a time savings of more than
95%). Bam! Imagine how much time you are going to save publishing with Captivate 5. How was this minor miracle performed? Thanks to Captivate's new incremental publish engine, only the slides that actually had changes were republished.
Dare I say that your time savings will quickly pay for the upgrade fee from Captivate 4 to 5?
Food for thought!Note: If you do need to republish all of the slides in your Captivate 5 project, not just the slides that have changed, simply select
Force re-publish all the slides in the
Advanced Options area of the Publish dialog box.

To learn more about the incremental publish engine or review the time trials mentioned above, visit the
Adobe Captivate blog.
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