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Quick Tip: Fuzzy/unreadable text in Adobe Captivate

by on December 1, 2008 with 7 Comments in Captivate , Quick Tip

One of the more annoying bugs in Adobe Captivate is the problem with text quality when you are using the transparent textboxes.

The text appears fuzzy and smeared and makes it hard to read. When you have spent a large amount of time making the perfect template and graphic design it sucks that the text quality will drag down your whole composition.

This bug has existed in Captivate through all the versions. I hoped that when Adobe launched Captivate 3 that the bug had been addressed, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. It’s weird because if you do a search on google it is obvious that a lot of people are annoying and frustrated about this problem. Also a lot of people (including my self) have sent bug reports to Adobe about this problem, but still it’s not fixed.

Lets hope that Adobe have fixed it in the upcoming Captivate 4…

Until then here is a little trick you can use, which will make your text clear and crisp when using transparent textboxes in Captivate.

All you need to do is inserting a bullet point somewhere in the text box. I normally make a couple of blank lines under the last line of text and then just insert an empty bullet point. After clicking ok I can adjust the size of the text box so that the bullet point is not visible to the user. That takes care of the fuzzy text and makes it readable.

An example of fuzzy text in Captivate

Please note that this only works with text up to size 12pt. Any text larger than 12pt will still be fuzzy and unreadable.

 

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  • VidaJohn

    Another option is to go to project preferences and select the checkbox for Don’t Anti-alias captions. It increases the size of the project but the text output looks much much better.

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    Hi VidaJohn and thanks for your comment.

    I didn’t know about that solution but I’ll try and test it tomorrow and see what happens ;o)

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    I tried the Don’t Anti-alias captions on one of my current projects. It’s a 53 slide Captivate project. If I use my normal method with adding a bulletpoint to the textboxes the published file is 2.4 mb. If I select the Don’t Anti-alias captions the size increases to to 3.5 mb. That’s not too bad really, but this project is probably not the best to test on since a lot of the content is loaded from external files.

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  • Jan

    Here’s yet another way to sharpen blurry text in Captivate’s transparent boxes:

    1. Open the text caption
    2. Click the highlight button and change the highlight color to c0c0c0. (Note: Those are zeros.)
    3. Highlight part of the text with this color, even just one character.

  • Peter

    thanks so much for the advice here. I have been trying for days to sort this issue out. I could not understand why some text was clear and other blury – I had some buttet points on the pages.

    thanks once again

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