Tutorial: Hide the total duration in the TOC

I thought I would continue with a couple of more tips & trics for manipulating the standard TOC in Adobe Captivate 4. I spent a day breaking open a Captivate file and peered into the mechanics of how everything works so I still have a couple of new things up my sleeve ;o)

Unfortunately these TOC manipulations are exclusive to AS2 projects. If you publish your Adobe Captivate project as AS3 then there seems to be no way of manipulating the TOC.

One thing that has always annoyed me is the TOC duration timer in the bottom of the TOC. The TOC settings allow you to deselect “Duration” so that each of your slides in the TOC won’t display the minutes / seconds it takes to complete that slide. One would think that if a developer disables the duration view for the individual slides then the total duration would also be disable but unfortunately not.

There is however a very simple approach to disable this TOC total duration display. Again we will need a custom Flash file to do the trick.

The code is just two lines (three with the stop command) and it looks like this:

Basically what we are doing is setting the movieclips inside Adobe Captivate 4 that holds the duration as invisible.

Of course you can make them visible again by changing the property from “false” to “true”.

I included a zip file here with the Flash file and the published SWF in case someone without access to Flash would like to use this feature. Ignore the _root warning when you insert the animation into Adobe Captivate.

Download the files here: Hide TOC Duration component / widget (220)

Have fun ;o)

/Michael