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Adobe Captivate: Sometimes Manual Labor is the Best Kind of Labor

by Kevin Siegel  

During the recording process, Captivate typically does a wonderful job of creating screen captures on processes you perform within an application. I said "typically" because there are occasions when Captivate fails to create some of the screen captures and you are left in a bit of a pickle. You won't know Captivate missed an important screen capture until you stop the recording process and begin producing the lesson in Captivate. By then, the missing screen(s) may require you to record additional slides.

Assuming you are using Captivate's Automatic recording mode as you record a series of clicks on your computer, Captivate is supposed to automatically create a single slide (screen capture) every time you click your mouse. Alternatively, you can use Captivate's FMR mode during the recording process. Using this mode, Captivate will create a Full Motion Recording (FMR) video if you drag your mouse instead of individual screens. You will end up with fewer slides, but you'll have less flexibility since videos are harder to edit than individual slides.

What if you wanted to record your mouse pointer, along with the pointer path, as you pointed at screen objects? You weren't planning to click anything, you were just going to point at screen objects. Since Captivate's Automatic recording mode requires you to click your mouse to create a screen capture, you're stuck. If you don't click, you won't get that all-important screen capture. You could record an FMR, but you don't want a video. What's a developer to do?

To get around the problem, you can create the screen captures on your own--manually. First show Captivate's Preferences dialog box (Adobe Captivate menu if you are using a Macintosh; Edit menu if you are using Windows). Select theKeys category and make a note of the shortcut required To Capture a Screenshot. (If you don't like the default key, you can click in the field and type your own preferred keyboard combination.)

During the recording process, press the Manual Recordingkey on your keyboard whenever you want to capture the screen. Every time you press the Manual Recording key you will create one screen capture, just as if you had clicked your mouse.

There is one final thing thing to think about when it comes to screen captures. During the recording process, I have heard from developers that the Automatic recording type simply doesn't work (often times there is only a single screen captured during the recording process). While Captivate records the screen actions in most applications, some applications don't appear to get along with Captivate. In that event, I'd suggest using Captivate's third (and least-used) Recording Type: Manual. Just prior to recording the lesson, select Manual from the Recording Type area.

Using the Manual recording type will require you to press your keyboard shortcut each and every time you want a screen capture. If you forget to pull the screen capture you'll be out of luck since Captivate won't do anything for you at all. While this Recording Type will certainly require a significant amount of discipline on your part, your finished recording will contain every screenshot you were expecting.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate: A Font Frenzy

by Kevin Siegel  

I received the following from fellow Captivate developer Johan Van Eeden. It seems Johan ran into some nasty font issues on his computer that totally derailed Captivate. He found a solution and shares it below.

Hi Kevin,

I recently sent you some information about a Captivate problem that I experienced: 

Soon after the green Captivate splash screen appears, the program freezes. 

The problem of Captivate hanging up on start-up is, according to the Adobe forums, one that is encountered quite a bit with versions 4, 5, and 5.5."

I tried installing, uninstalling and reinstalling Captivate several times, to no avail. The Captivate forum pages offer various remedies. I found a solution that worked on this page (at the bottom).

Apparently, if there are corrupted fonts on the PC, this can cause Captivate to hang up.

To resolve the issues, developers will need to:

1. Download and install FontFrenzy.
2. Take a Snapshot of the fonts on the PC.
3. "Unfrenzy" -- this moves all the non-system fonts on your PC to a specified directory. All you will have left in the Windows\Fonts directory will be the fonts that were installed with Windows.
4. Start Captivate.

To get your fonts back, you can "Refrenzy" them, or a selected group of fonts. I'm currently re-installing my fonts one letter of the alphabet at a time, then running Captivate after installing, for example, all the fonts starting with "C." In this way I hope to eventually track down the corrupted fonts."

UPDATE

I installed the fonts, alphabet letter by letter, until I got to I. After each letter's fonts were installed, Captivate would run. However, after I installed the fonts starting with the letter "I", Captivate froze again.

When I looked at the font names, I noticed that there were two fonts with an umlaut in the font name, on the letter "e", thus "ë."

I deleted both fonts from the Windows\Fonts directory and Captivate loaded without a problem.

It seems that, for whatever reason, Captivate can't handle fonts with an umlaut in the font name... something to bear in mind when people mention that they're experiencing the "Captivate freezes while loading problem." 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe RoboHelp: Importing & Linking Word Documents

RoboHelp allows you to integrate content created by different authors in Microsoft Word and Adobe FrameMaker. You can create projects by linking or importing Word and FrameMaker documents and then publish in different formats, including printed documentation. You can also use Word and FrameMaker documents as source files in an existing RoboHelp project. 

This article is a quick summary of the import and linking process.

PowerPoint 2010: Copy a Master Slide from a Previous Presentation

by AJ George 

Ever received a PowerPoint presentation from someone and wished you could apply your own, previously created master slides in the presentation? Easy peasy; here's how:

1. Open both the recipient and the source presentation (the source presentation is the one that has the master slide you would like to use in the recipient presentation).
2. From within the source presentation, choose View > Master Views > Slide Master.
3. In the slide thumbnail pane on the left, right-click the master slide that you would like to copy. (Selecting the larger slide master at the top will automatically select all of its associated layouts. To copy just one layout, you would right-click and copy just that master slide.)
4. Choose View > Window > Switch Windows and select the recipient presentation. 
5. In the recipient presentation, choose View > Master Views > Slide Master.
6. If there is not already a customized slide master in the recipient presentation, right-click one of the blank slides and choose Paste (or press [Ctrl] [v]).
7. If the recipient presentation already contains customized slide masters, right-click below the last customized slide. You can select either Use the Destination Theme (the first image below) to use the theme of the current presentation; or Paste Keeping the Source Formatting (the second image below) so the pasted master will have the theme of the source presentation.
   
      
8. When you are finished, choose Slide Master > Close > Close Master View. 

Writing & Grammar: The Importance of Knowing (at least some) Parts of Speech

by Jennie Ruby  

If you have spoken English since infancy, you probably have a lot of the structures of English built into your head. You don't need me to tell you, for example, how to fix this sentence:

Towel the into the dryer went.

You probably immediately saw that the sentence was backwards (Yoda-speak) and that the word the goes beforetowel, not after it. The normally structured sentence would read:

The towel went into the dryer.

Why do we have to study grammar rules, then, if we know things like this without even thinking? Because not all areas of English are equally obvious. Punctuation, for example, is an area where we often have to fall back on rules instead of relying on, let's just call it "instinct." So in the interest of being able to punctuate correctly, today, I give you the coordinating conjunctions.

A conjunction is a word that joins things. We have several types of conjunctions in English, but the most commonly used are the coordinating conjunctions. They are used to coordinate two or more equally important points or ideas. There are only seven of them. I recommend memorizing them. Here they are:

But, Or, Yet, For, And, Nor, So

I have capitalized them here to facilitate memorization using the mnemonic device BOYFANS (or maybe you like the music of the Backstreet Boys, so you are a BOYS FAN). Either way, I recommend memorizing these seven words. Once you have them memorized, you can make snap decisions about punctuating compound sentences.

 A. She went to the grocery store early but they were all out of kale.

 B. She went to the grocery store early however they were all out of kale.

Which of these sentences requires a comma, and which requires a semicolon? If you have the seven coordinating conjunctions memorized, you can easily make this decision. Which example is actually two complete sentences joined by one of the seven coordinating conjunctions? If you said A, you'd be correct. Two complete sentences joined by a coordinating conjunction require a comma before the conjunction.

A. She went to the grocery store early, but they were all out of kale.

Try it on your own. My challenge this week is this: which of the following sentences consist of two complete sentences joined by a coordinating conjunction, and where does the comma go in each? Feel free to post your answers below by replying to this post. 

1. The teacup is on the table but the saucer is on the floor.
2. The File menu contains all of the commands for opening, saving, and renaming files.
3. The birdfeeder was full of sunflower seeds and corn yet the birds did not come.
4. The show featured two major stars so the budget was higher than normal.
5. The shadow of the billboard fell across the front windows and darkened the space within.

Also, keep an eye out for these kinds of sentences this week. Happy hunting!

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Jennie teaches two of our writing classes: Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts and Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts.

Adobe RoboHelp: Apply a CSS Project-Wide in a Snap

by Kevin Siegel  

If you want to ensure that the appearance of your topics is consistent project-wide, one of the first things you should think about doing is creating a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and then assigning the CSS to all the topics in your project.

To assign the CSS to a single topic, open the topic. On the Formatting toolbar, click the Assign Style Sheet or Create New command. Select an existing CSS from the drop-down menu (or create a new one on the fly) and you are done.

Using the technique above will get the job done. However, you can only use this technique to assign a style sheet to one topic at a time. A typical RoboHelp project is likely to have hundreds (if not thousands) of topics.

To assign style sheets to multiple topics, use the Topic Listpod to select as many topics as you want (you can select all of the topics by clicking once on any topic and then pressing [Ctrl] [a] on your keyboard). With the topics selected, chooseEdit > Properties to open the Topic Properties dialog box.

On the Appearance tab, select the CSS you'd like to use from the list of Style Sheets at the left (in the Style Sheet area) and click the OK button.

Since multiple topics were selected before you opened the Topic Properties dialog box, all of the selected topics will now be using the same CSS.

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Need to learn RoboHelp? We have a 2-day class starting January 30.

Adobe Captivate: FMRs With all the Trimmings

by Kevin Siegel  

Last week I showed you how to use Captivate to create a seamless video using the Full Motion Recording (FMR) mode. One of the problems with FMRs is limited editing ability. If you use Captivate's Automatic mode, every time you click your mouse a screen capture will be created. However, if you use the FMR mode, a single video will be created.

When it comes to post-recording editing, the difference between the Automatic and FMR modes is very stark. Using the slide-based screen capture approach of the Automatic recording mode, you can edit every aspect of a slide, even a slide's background (using external programs such as Photoshop or Paint). With the FMR mode's video-based recording approach you still have editing options, but they are limited.

Edit an FMR

To begin the FMR editing process, select the FMR on the Timeline. 

On the Properties panel, locate the FMR Edit Options group. There are three options: Insert, Split and Trim.

If you choose Insert, you'll have an opportunity to record another FMR within the selected FMR. This is a handy option if you need to add more video in the middle of an existing scene.

The Split option will splice your video wherever you position the Playhead on the Timeline and create a second segment. The new segment will automatically appear on a new slide. I've found this option to be useful when a single slide FMR is simply too long. In my opinion, slides that play for a shorter duration will be more effective in the long run when compared to slides that tend to play on and on and on.

I've found the final option, Trim, to be the most beneficial, especially if I've made a mistake during the recording process and need to get rid of it.

Using the Trim option is simple enough. With the FMR selected on the Timeline, choose Trim from the FMR Edit Options drop-down menu.

On the Timeline, select the area of the FMR that you'd like to remove. If you find it difficult to manually select specific areas on the FMR, you can use the Trim From and To fields on the FMR Edit Options group. Or you can let Captivate do the selecting for you by choosing a Start and End Marker.

The last step is to simply click the Trim button on the bottom of the FMR Edit Options group.

 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

 

Adobe Captivate: FMRs Rule?

by Kevin Siegel  

I've been teaching and developing with Adobe Captivate for years. The program has always been able to record Full Motion Recordings (FMRs). Never heard of an FMR? You are not alone. Usually developers learn about them by accident. If you record your screen using Captivate's Automatic mode, every click of your mouse will result in a single screen capture. Those screen captures convert to single slides in a Captivate project once you end the recording session.

During the recording process, if you perform a mouse drag (click the mouse clicker and then move the mouse around the screen), Captivate won't capture a single screen. Instead, Captivate will capture the entire drag event as a video--it'll be as if you've pointed a video camera at the screen and turned it on. When you finish with the recording, you'll see a single slide in Captivate representing the captured event.

Since FMRs aren't as easy to edit or control as single slides, I usually tell new Captivate developers to shy away from dragging the mouse during the recording process. Instead, I encourage everyone to click on screen items to ensure they get single screen captures.

In retrospect, I may have been overly hard on FMRs--they do have a role. FMRs can be useful if you want to demonstrate complex mouse events smoothly. For instance, if you're trying to show someone how to use a specific filter in Photoshop, capturing the process with an FMR might be more effective than simple screen captures.

To create an FMR during the recording process, simply select Full Motion from the Recording Type area and record your lesson. 

 

Once you end the recording, the captured video will appear on the Filmstrip as a single slide. You'll be able to differentiate FMR slides from regular slides easily enough... FMR thumbnails on the Filmstrip have a little camera icon in the lower right.

 

Next week I'll show you how to edit the FMR. In the meantime, check out the FMR I created late last year (it shows thedifferences between Captivate 5 and 5.5).

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe RoboHelp: Import Word Documents and Keep the Shapes

by Kevin Siegel  

You can do a lot of fancy stuff in Word. In fact, if you're really comfortable using the program, you can create a book that looks every bit as good as those produced by desktop publishers using programs such as QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Adobe FrameMaker. (Okay, okay... I'm not going to venture any deeper into the muck... Word can create some pretty complex stuff, but it's not for me... I prefer to use FrameMaker.)

Many people who use RoboHelp also use Word as the main authoring tool for the content that will be imported into RoboHelp. Unfortunately, during the import process there's potential trouble around every corner. For instance, the more complex the Word layout, the higher the risk that something will go wrong when that layout is imported into RoboHelp.

Let's take Word's ability to wrap text around an item and the Shapes feature as examples. You can use the Shapes feature to quickly draw a line or a callout to a screen capture inserted into a Word document. The shapes may look just fine in Word. However, once imported into a RoboHelp project the resulting collection of screen capture, line and callout will rarely look very good. This is especially true if you use any of Word'sWrap Text features other than Inline with Text. (One would use Word's Wrap feature on an object to control exactly where that object appears in the Word layout.) For example, in the image below Word's Wrap Text was set to Tight. There's a callout to the right and a squiggly line. 

The image below shows the content after it has been imported into a new RoboHelp topic. Notice that the Shapes did make it into RoboHelp... but the integrity of the layout has been lost.

 

If you need to use the text wrap and Shapes feature in Word, I have a simple trick that will allow you to maintain much of the layout in RoboHelp.

1. Select the screen capture and shapes in the Word document. (Shift-click works nicely for this purpose.)
2. Cut the selected items to the clipboard (Ctrl-x).
3. On the Home tab of Word's Ribbon, click the bottom of the Paste command and choose Paste Special.
   
    
   
   The Paste Special dialog box opens.  
   
    
4. Select Picture (JPEG) from the As list and click the OKbutton.
   
   

The independent shapes have been converted into a single image. Once imported into RoboHelp, the Shapes will appear as they did in Word... and they'll Generate just fine too.

 

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Need to learn RoboHelp? We have a 2-day class starting soon.