A lot of people added comments to the “About this blog and me” and “Captivate components” pages.
I made this post so I can move those comments here instead.
It seems like there is a need for visitors on this blog to ask questions etc. so I decided to make a forum. In the forum people will be able to ask questions, put ideas of development and hopefully help eachother. Currently I’m looking in to the various forum solutions on the market. Once the forum is up and running I’ll put a post on the blog.
25 Comments
Do you know how to change the fonts for the dynamic text that appears in the answer box for fill-in-the-blank questions? I have looked everywhere, deconstructed swf-fla files, and still I can’t find what it is that produces the format for this one position. I need to change the font because we are using a customized font with diacritics for Russian in the teaching program we are trying to construct and that font has to be named. It doesn’t matter if the naming affects other functions. This is really frustrating: everything in Captivate works for us, except this. And in Captivate 4, though they’ve enhanced format editing significantly, there is still no way within the framework of the program to do this. As a beta-tester on Captivate 4 I suggested more than once that they support this function, but evidently it’s so deeply embedded somewhere they’re unable to. I’d very much appreciate your advice. Thank you.
Hi Diana,
I never seen anywhere where that could be changed to be honest. I’ll try and take a look and see if I can find anything.
I guess that you are using CP4 since you were a beta-tester. Have you thought about constructing your own fill-in-the-blank widget in Flash and have that communicate with Captivate through the variables? That way you could control and embed the relevant fonts.
Best regards,
Michael
Hi there. We use captivate to produce e-learning content. We are looking to deploy the content via USB sticks as we have quite a lot of video content.
We are looking at options for protecting the content, but are not having much luck. We have tried SWFMaestro but it seems to fall over because it applies a ‘wrapper’ to the content (producing a single SWF file), and subsequently the internal ‘Captivate project’ links aren’t recognised. (opens the linked Captivate project content in a separate blank web browser window)
We are trying to achieve the following:
1) Be able to set time expiry on the content (maybe it does a check with a server, so we can control when it expires)
2) protect the content so the SWF video clips that make up the module can’t be reused.
Any ideas for an approach?
kind regards
Mark Foster
Hi Mark,
I’m not to sure if it’s possible because you want to distrubute it on USB-sticks. Are the client computers connected to the Internet?
The expiry should be easy enough to achieve. Captivate offers the possibility to set a “project expiry date”. After that date has passed then the content can’t play anymore. (of course you could change the date on your computer and then it would play again).
If your computers are connected to the Internet it would probably also be possible to write some script in Flash that checks a specific server for an authorization before the content can play. I do that with content played on the Internet – my content is locked to a domain and also checks for a “keyfile” before it plays. Trouble is that I’m not sure how it would behave if you have content you play locally and the content needs to communicate with the Internet to authorize the playback. I’m pretty sure it would result in a Flash security warning
Are you using the Captivate playbars or do you have your own navigation in the modules?
I’ll try and check if the solution I use will work on content played locally and post my findings here.
Best regards,
Michael
Hi Michael,
I have a problem with a captivate 4 project.
As part of an e-learning project I made a presentation with a number of slides. Some of these slides contain flv videos, others are quiz slides.
Sometimes, when I start presentation, the slides containing flv videos play till the end of the video but video progress bar does not move and at the end of video slide freeze and does not go to next slide. If I refresh page (pressing F5 one or more times) the presentation restarts from the beginning (and this is a problem) and everything goes well.
I tried all cache related methods but did not solve the problem: do you experienced some thing like this ?
Nello
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I ma looking for something that can manipulate Captivate in a quiz to include name and other related personal data also to use the Name/Date info to print on a Certificate upon passing and completion. Is there anything available?
If you have Captivate 4 then you could use the Certificate Widget for that purpose. For Captivate 3 it would have to be something custom built in Flash to make it work.
Hi Michael,
May I use the Captivate Key Lock or Captivate Secure component to domain lock my swf movies? (how would I go about obtaining it?) Which component is more secure? Hve you found a way to maintain security with movies that have a playbar?
Regards,
Patrick
Hi, I just got Captivate 4 loaded on my laptop. I’m having audio issues, mainly C4 saying it can’t decode wav/mp3. I get the same error message when I try to generate text speech too.
I can play wav/mp3 in other Adobe apps.
Thanks, Bill
Hi Michael,
First thank you for your eblog. I found some really good tips that go beyond the basic tutorials in the program. I have a question similar to Diane but ours is a bit bigger. We have Hawaiian cultural course and need to have text and questions with macrons over the vowels. Is there a way to upload a font family and use it instead of the built in fonts?
Even the built in font is thin and pixelated, is there a better font that can be chosen. I tried to change the text color even and it was unavailable. Perhaps because I was using the question template in a project rather than duplicating it first? Thank you.
Hi Joan,
To my knowledge there is no way to import a font-family into Captivate. I know from the Adobe forums that some people had issues with Russian language as well and that they submitted a bug report to Adobe about it.
As for the built in font – are you using transparent textboxes? If so try and add a bullet point a couple of line below your last line of text and adjust the text box size so that the bullet point isn’t visible. Captivate has some major issues with transparent text boxes and text antialiasing.
Sorry I couldn’t be of more help..
/Michael
Can you drop me an email to: akarrer@techempower.com
Thanks,
Tony
Hi, can you tell me how to get flash swf files with embedded audio working in Captivate?
I have a number of swf’s developed in Flash CS4 with audio, when i import them into Captivate 4 the audio will only play if i have “Sychronize to Project” unticked?
Anyone got suggestions on how to fix this?
Thanks
Gary
Hi Gary,
Is it a problem for you to have the “Syncronize to project” unticked?
One thing you could try is to “down-publish” you flash files if possible. If you published for FP10 then try and publish to FP8 or FP9. It seems like Captivate 4 is doing some weird things with FP10 files.
/Michael
I
I have been testing the certificate widget in Captivate 4 in my latest project.
When you select the print button, the certificate prints in portrait mode. If you dig into the printer preferences in the Print dialog box, you can switch to landscape – making the certificate fill the page nicely.
Is there any way to force the certificate to print in landscape mode without having to make the user go into printer preferences?
Thanks,
Guy
Great site this http://www.captivate4.com and I am really pleased to see you have what I am actually looking for here and this this post is exactly what I am interested in. I shall be pleased to become a regular visitor 🙂
Hi Guy,
I think I read something about this problem on the Adobe Captivate forums. I’ll see if I can find the thread and post a link to it.
/Michael
Hi Micheal
I hoep you can help… I am really struggling with widgets… and I am trying desperately to get this to work:
I need that when a user clicks on a ClickBox the embedded Flash swf goes to a given frame.
Is it possible to send a rdcmndGotoFrameAndResume command directly from Captivate to the Flash timeline? Or how can such behaviour be done?
Would you have any example of captivate file and .flash .fla that shows such a behavours… it seems simple but I alghout I find Captivate intuitive for most things, this part is a bit oscure.
Any help immensely appreciated.
Hi Egomet,
It should be possible but it’s not as easy as it would seem.
Captivate cannot send a rdcmndGotoFrameAndResume command to Flash, since this is a Captivate system variable. This is what you would use when you send instructions from Flash TO Captivate.
You could probably achieve what you are looking for by using the new user defined variables in Captivate. You would need to create a variable in Captivate and then assign it with a default value. Then you need to tie this variable together with your click box so that if the user clicks inside the box it sets the variable to 1 and if the user clicks outside it sets the variable to 2.
Then you need to create a Flash component that specifically listens for changes in the Captivate user defined variable and takes appropriate action when the value changes.
In order to get access to the Captivate user variables you need to user parts of the Widget API. I don’t have any sample files for this purpose unfortunately.
One question – why do you need to have this communication between Captivate and Flash to begin with? From what I can understand it looks like you want a Flash animation to play certain elements when a users clicks a specific area. Why can’t you just make the entire thing in Flash (including the click boxes) and then import it into Captivate as an animation?
/Michael
Hi Michael
As you say I thought it was going to be simpler to achieve this at least with Captivate 4.
I will follow your advice and develop the whole interaction animation in Flash and then import.
The reason I thought of controling Flash timelime from Captivate is that in this way I could use/retain more easily the various hints/failure captions, and score tracking functionality etc.
Maybe could you kindly suggest how to pass a variable from Flash to Captivate, in order to keep the score in Flash and pass it to Captivate?
Much appreciated your support.
I am currently declaring a user variable in Captivate and then use
root[“Variable Name”] = Value in Flash to set it.
It works …but I am wondering if it is the best/correct way.
Hi Egomet,
That is how I normally do it as well and I never had any problems with it.
/Michael
Hi Michael
if in the future you have the opportunity to have and make available an example of this, it would be an extremely interesting topic for many I think.
cheers again
Hi, Im having troubles with some flash content that I try to attach in Captivate. I have tried with _parent, with _lockroot and doesn´t work. It is a game and only shows the first screen, when I click START the screen disappear and goes to the first slide in captivate. Do you have some ideas on how can I fix my problem?
Thanks!