STS Blog

If you’ve just started using Captivate, the best advice I can give is the kind that should be printed in big, friendly letters on the front of every technology-related reference guide or manual… DON’T PANIC.  While there are a million and one reasons to use our favorite demo/presentation/simulation software, there are a few issues that you are inevitably going to have to deal with.  In the past I’ve written about consistent, reproducible errors that I’ve had to work around, but once in a while I run into something entirely new and unpredictable.

After recording a demo today, I went back into the project to edit the auto-generated captions.  I checked the “Apply To All” options and then changed the caption style from Adobe Blue to Haloblue.  The default text size for both caption styles is 12 pts, but when I clicked OK, it changed all caption text to the Haloblue style… at 16 pts.

I undid the change, re-tried it on the same caption, and saw the same behavior.  After closing and re-opening Captivate, I could no longer replicate the issue.

So don’t panic.  Always reboot first.

Tell Someone About This Post:

I don’t have time to write yet another long post complaining about Captivate today, so I figured I would tell you about some useful font-matching tools that I’ve come across lately:

• What The Font? (above) - upload a sample image containing the text that you wish to analyze, and then confirm the characters shown in the image when prompted.  A few seconds later, WTF spits out a list possible fonts.  It was successful in identifying the font used for its own logo, so it is at least functional, but more extensive testing is needed - still, it is a useful tool to keep in your bookmark file.

• Identifont (above) - similar to What The Font, Identifont will ask you around 15 questions about a font you are looking at and then take a guess as to what it is.  Didn’t have much luck with this one (got confused with Times New Roman) but then again I was only using a few letters.  I also can’t rule out user error since some of the questions were worded in such a way that they confused me.  I guess that’s what I get for being an “ESL” kid…

Hopefully these tools will make font-matching a little bit easier next time you need to do something like that.  Enjoy!

Tell Someone About This Post:

Howdy folks! Hope all has been well since our last exciting installment in our ongoing Captivate entomology series.

Since my last post back in May, I’ve had the mixed experience of upgrading to the latest version of my *favorite* software package in the world. I would be ready to give our faithful readers a full run-down of the new features and enhancements in v.3, if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been tied up troubleshooting what I considered to be a show-stopping issue with the new version: an apparent inability to capture full-motion recordings.

For the uninitiated, Captivate creates animations by snapping screenshots, stringing them together, and then animating mouse movements and typing actions over those captures. Since this approach does not work for things like scrolling and drag-and-drop operations, Captivate documents those types of actions by creating full-motion SWF recordings for the duration of the scrolling or dragging movement. But I found that this was not the case after upgrading. I was unable to capture full motion with version 3, no matter how hard I tried. Naturally, I tried reinstalling the software at first, and when that didn’t work, I followed all the recommended troubleshooting steps:

• Tested with hardware acceleration disabled and then enabled - no dice either way. Everything that did not require full motion was captured perfectly, though.
• Tried forcing full motion during a capture session using the F9 and F10 hotkeys… useless. Same results as above.
• I even tried switching Captivate to Full-Motion Recording mode for the entire capture session. This left me with a single screenshot on a single slide… no full-motion slides.

Having exhausted all my options, I proceeded to pull my hair out for a few hours while scanning the Captivate forums on the Adobe site for issues similar to mine. While I didn’t find anything useful regarding my full-motion recording issue, I did see a lot of posts about a bug caused by the latest Captivate update where clicking into a text caption with formatted text would cause the caption to either lose all formatting or apply the formatting to the entire caption text.  Notice how the one below lost both the bold and italic formatting when I clicked in to edit it:

Since this was caused by the latest update, I decided to reinstall and then stop the update process to see if that would resolve the issue.  It fixed both problems!  Without the update, I was again able to create full-motion recordings and edit captions without having to re-format them. But there’s a catch… Captivate does not allow you to turn off the updater, nor does it prompt you before downloading and installing.

Well, that didn’t stop me. You can easily hack your way around this issue by opening the Captivate folder inside your computer’s Program Files folder (usually C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 3\) and destroying the updater library (AdobeUpdater.dll). Just make sure you keep an eye out for the next update, which should correct the text formatting and full-motion recording issues. I’m not sure if they can be applied manually - if not, we will all need to reinstall Captivate to add the updater back.

Hope it helps!

Tell Someone About This Post:

Don’t have much time to spend on this post today but I thought I would put something up regarding some Captivate bugs that I’ve experienced recently, and how I’ve worked either with them or around them:

Click boxes that can’t do simple math

Captivate click boxes give you the ability to specify an action to perform when a user clicks outside of the box a certain number of times. While building a quiz-type activity, I thought this would be a good way to invoke an error message whenever the student clicked on not-the-right-answer enough times (I set it to 2 times). The error message would then take the student back to the start of the activity to try again. Well, it worked, except that after getting a wrong answer on the first slide and cycling back through to the same slide, the click box reacted to clicking on not-the-right-answer a single time (instead of twice, like I specified in the click box’s properties). I haven’t figured out how to work around this - if you did, tell me about it in the comments!

Control strips that refuse to leave

A while ago, I put up a post recommending the use of a control strip to speed up the debug process for a Captivate project. In retrospect, didn’t that seem too easy? It probably was… I have tested a few projects since then, and I’ve found that one of my presentations simply refuses to relinquish its control strip. I tried disabling it in the Skin Editor, but the only thing I accomplished with that was to make Captivate behave unpredictably in terms of rendering the presentation.

Sometimes it would include a full control strip, and sometimes it would render the project with a blank gray area over where the strip should be, regardless of the settings specified in the Skin Editor menu.

I’m not too happy to report that the only work-around I’ve found for this is to re-activate the control strip, disable all the controls on the strip, and then deactivate the strip again so that Captivate decides to include it during rendering, all the user sees is a blank gray space with an Info button.

Anyway, that’s it for the bug report. Expect to hear from me again during the next few days as I document my upgrade to Captivate 3 - I know I’m way behind on this, but unfortunately I have to work with whatever the client provides. Anyway, I am looking forward to trading out all of the little quirks that I’ve gotten used to for a whole new set of bugs… bring ‘em on, and stay tuned!

Tell Someone About This Post:

As a technical documentation expert, I pride myself on being able to get the most out of the simple tools that usually sit unused in most people’s Start menus. Why go through the trouble of setting up SnagIt just to capture a simple screenshot, when Alt + Print Screen and MS Paint will accomplish the same job at no additional cost?

Well, SnagIt’s time-delay feature is pretty useful… when I end up using it once a month. Otherwise, the software just sits there on disk, accumulating virtual dust.

This aversion to installing software, coupled with the fact that I have to re-image my test machine every few months means that I often need to generate documentation on a computer running nothing but an operating system. This type of situation is bound to affect anyone’s productivity, regardless of their level of MacGyver-ness. (Ever try to edit a .CSV file in Notepad?)

So what is a technical writer to do when faced with such a dilemma? You’ve got some options:

• You could lose an hour of your life installing and setting up a Microsoft product.
• You could fire up Google Docs and most likely violate your NDA or your client’s security policies.
• You could check out Tiny USB Office, dump it on your thumb drive, and never worry about this problem again, ever.

Behold:

While there are more than a few Office-replacement packages out there that will fit on a thumb drive, Tiny USB Office is the first one I’ve used that covers all the bases with such a small footprint (2.5 MB!) It even does some extra things that you won’t find in Office, like password recovery, secure deletion, and PDF creation. Best of all, this stuff travels on your USB drive and runs directly from it, so you can take your work anywhere there is a Windows machine.

Kind of like how ninjas always walk around with their katanas.

Tiny USB Office

Tell Someone About This Post:

The I’d Rather Be Writing techcom blog posts 10 Alternative Tests for Technical Writing Job Candidates. Not all of the ideas apply to our situation at STS, as we are all technical writers here, we don’t really have in-house documentation, and tend to recruit more entry-level folks who we can mold to our ways before they are corrupted by outside influences. However, there were some interesting suggestions.

I like number 10, especially:

Check to see whether the writer formatted his or her resume with styles.

I look at the formatting of resumes, cover letters, and writing samples in detail before I read them. Seriously, folks. Your resume is a great opportunity to show that you have some grasp of good information mapping practices as well as some skill in Microsoft Word. (And as awful as Word is, most technical writers will be using it an awful lot.)

Using styles gives you bonus points in my book. But if you don’t use styles, you should at least make sure the formatting is consistent. If some of your job titles are 10 pt. and some are 11 pt., I will notice. If you have two hard returns between some items and one between others, I will notice. If you use strings of spaces instead of tabs or paragraph styles to position your text, it will never line up perfectly, and I will notice.

Lack of attention to detail is a deal breaker in a candidate, and a poorly formatted resume is a great big warning sign about your ability to spot those tedious errors that a quality technical writer must be able to spot.

Tell Someone About This Post:

The client that I currently work for requires all employees and contractors to be available on a proprietary instant messaging system at all times during working hours.

Unfortunately, mixing Captivate and instant messaging programs can cause issues with the auto-labeling feature during your capture sessions:

Not only can it get annoying when your captured slides show a callout for every time that you received a message, I’ve also found that Captivate 2 has a nasty tendency to crash about 50% of the times that an instant message comes in - this has cost me hours in terms of lost time and effort, so watch out! Of course, there’s no good way to tell if the issue is due to Captivate or the instant messaging app, but I suspect both of them are contributing. I’ve found a good number of confirmed bugs in Captivate when it runs by itself.

I now make a habit (with my manager’s approval) of “dropping off the radar” and shutting off all applications whenever I am about to capture a Captivate simulation. I suggest you do the same.

And hey, by shutting off Outlook you might just discover how much you enjoy ignoring e-mails.

Tell Someone About This Post:

eLearning Weekly has a love/hate relationship with Captivate. It’s fun to read about it, especially since they point out workarounds that might save me some time.

Mobilemind also has some tips on how to avoid breaking SCORM when using Captivate.

Ah… nothing is as beautiful as the majestic Captivate bug in its natural habitat!

Here’s a few other things I’ve learned about this wonderful tool (version 2 in particular):

• Don’ t waste your time trying to double up elements (imate-text, image-image, or text-text) on the same area. It confuses Captivate and just doesn’t work.
• Be careful (and do looots of testing) if you use lots of click boxes on the same slide… they tend to mess up when there are more than one or two.
• If you need to import an animation, turn it into a .swf beforehand to avoid problems. In the past, I’ve tried to use animated .gifs with mixed results.
• Run Captivate by itself - kill as many other applications and processes as you can to avoid crashes (iTunesHelper.exe is not an essential operating system process). Save your work often. Even though you should be doing both of these things already, it’s especially important when working with The Cap.

Stay tuned… I work with this beast on an almost daily basis so I’m sure there will be more tips coming!

[Picture of leaf-cutters by mariandy_gizfel.]

Tell Someone About This Post:

My current Shoap Technical Services assignment requires me to work with Captivate extensively. We use the tool to create walk-throughs of new systems and software, as well as web-based training packages that students can study independently, and at their own pace.

Normally, we’ll build the courses so that course navigation is part of the standard slide template that we use, like so:

This is handy since we like that students can skip back and forth through the slides, but the controls dissappear whenever a video simulation is shown… this way we keep students from skipping forward through the simulation and they have to at least pretend to watch it. This is great for course delivery, however if you are the person creating the slides and debugging the course, it can get very tedious and very boring, very quickly.

The solution is quite simple, even though it took me months to think of it.

Since Captivate allows you to “skin” your presentations with some pre-defined controls, I use the skin feature to my advantage.

Selecting Project > Skin… brings up the Skin Editor. I’m pretty sure you can guess what that does.

Clicking the checkbox next to Show playback control enables the skin - it will be shown over your presentation when you publish it. You can also use the Skin Editor to choose on which side of the presentation you would like the playback controls to be shown.

Now, when you render the presentation, it will have a nice control strip laid over the selected portion of the presentation.

I use this method when I publish presentations that I am going to review. Clicking and dragging the marker on the progress bar gives me an easy way to navigate through the simulations looking for spelling errors, issues with callouts fading in and out (or not doing it), timing problems, inappropriate mouse click sounds, and so on. And this way, it doesn’t take foreeeever.

Note: I used Captivate 2 for this article since it is what I currently have to work with. If you have a spare license for version 3 that they you don’t need for some reason, shoot me an e-mail ASAP! I’d love to take it off your hands…

Tell Someone About This Post:

I’ve covered in the past some of Flare’s wonky behavior when it comes it to white space. I found another fun trick involving white space while searching in Flare 2.5 yesterday.

One of the changes I needed to make on a document I was working on involved a global search and replace. I needed to change all instances of SnazzyGood API (names changed to protect the innocent) to Snazzy Good API Manual. Easy enough. However, I found when I was done that Flare’s search and replace had missed a number of instances. I took a look at the source of those instances to find out why.

It turns out that in the HTML, Flare occasionally inserted a line break and extra white space between SnazzyGood and API, instead of just a single space. Since HTML treats any length of white space as a single space, this:

<p>I like to use the SnazzyGood API</p>

has the same output as this:

<p>I like to use the SnazzyGood

              API</p>

But Flare treats them as different strings in searches, which is not the behavior I would expect. This means that you can’t trust any search with a space in it. Oh, Flare, why won’t you let me love you more?

Fortunately, Flare has the option to use regular expressions in searches, so we can work around this feature.

First, in the Find and Replace window, you need to tell Flare that your search will use regular expressions. Under options, select Use and then choose Regular Expressions from the drop-down.

Now, under Find what, you’ll need to replace any spaces with \s+. \s means any white space. + means one or more occurrence. So my search and replace becomes:

Not sure if the fine folks in San Diego have fixed this for version 3.0 or if they actually think this is a good idea, but in 2.5, you’ll need to use this any time you want to use Flare’s search and replace to find a string containing spaces.

Tell Someone About This Post: