Posted by: Josh Cavalier

So I was teaching a Captivate class yesterday, and came across something REALLY interesting about text in captions.

First, the text rendering in Captivate 1.01 is REALLY poor. Is doesn't use the Flash text rendering engine - every font is rendered in an "aliased" format so that there's more of a "Microsoft Powerpoint" look to it. I know - THAT"S PAINFUL! Please drop your font sizes down to 9 or 10 pts. (12 pt. text in Captivate is more like 14pt. text in Fireworks. )

NOTE: Transparent captions are the exception - they will anti-alias - which totally blows my mind.

Ok - here's the little tip:
Captivate retains most paragraph formating by copying from Microsoft Word directly to a Captivate caption! This is perfect for spreading bullets out. Just keep in mind that if you do copy bullets over from Word - that they will be using the Symbol font. You may want to use the ASCII bullet (ALT+0149).

I have yet to test every text situation from Word to Captivate - so if you try this - please test your .SWF output.

Finally, don't bother trying to copy artwork from the clipboard into a Captivate caption - it doesn't work. ;)

Posted by: Josh Cavalier

Macromedia just posted a solution for creating a right click simulation in Captivate. Finally!

The work around uses a combination of CSS, JavaScript and IE 6 browser tricks - but the darn thing works. Oh, there are a coulple gotchas:

• You must make a security change in any Flash Player 8 to allow Captivate to communicate with JavaScript on your local hard drive.
• Microsoft IE 6 only solution

After looking at the code, I don't see why this same solution couldn't work in Firefox or Mozilla. There is a call to VBScript, but I think this can be replaced with some common DOM/JavaScript code.

Big kudos to Steven Shongrunden at Sun City Design for coming up with this one.

Posted by: Josh Cavalier

This question came up in class the other day, and I thought - why not? It should work...
So I decided t give it a go, and this is what I came up with:

First you have to encode a video as an .FLV with the Flash 8 Video Encoder program

• Open the Flash 8 Video encoder
• Click the Add.. button
• Find the movie you want to encode and add it to the cue
• Click the Settings… button – the Flash Video encoding settings window appears
• Click show advanced settings
• The Video Codec option must be Sorenson Spark! The On2 VP6 only plays in the flash 8 player – remember Captivate only likes Flash 6 (Sometimes Flash 7 content)
• Flash 7 medium quality should do it…
• Click OK to encode the video…
• Now you have your .flv
   
  Creating the Flash movie
• Open Flash 8
• GO down to the property inspector and choose the Settings.. button
• Choose the Flash player 6 button
• Form  the Components panel drag a  Media Player 6-7 / Media playback component
• Open the Components Inspector (Alt+F7) or Window à Component Inspector
• Click the media component on the stage
• In the Component inspector type in the name of the .flv file in the URL text box
• Your .FLV file and the SWF need to be in the same folder!
• Export your .swf File > Publish
• Import your SWF into Captivate

This process has NOT been extensively tested, but it did work in class - and I was a tad bit surprised. Be sure to test the Flash media component functionally from the Captivate generated SWF.