FirefoxGoogle ChromeNPAPI. Chrome Mozilla Firefox. Noregistration upload of files up to 250MB. Not available in some countries. Setting up Preferences in Adobe Captivate. Its a little known trade secret that many issues reported by Adobe Captivate users can be avoided or minimized simply by judicious configuration of Captivates Preference options. While some of the modifications recommended below can prevent file corruption or loss of work, other suggested settings just make using Captivate easier and more reliable to work with. Captivate has hundreds of preference options you can configure. But in this article Im only mentioning those preferences that need to be changed to avoid issues, improve performance, or maintain reliability. Global vs. project preferences. Once you know your PC is set up correctly to work with Captivate and the application itself has been installed correctly without issue, the temptation is to just dive in and start work. But before embarking on serious e learning development you should set your Preference options. Butheres where it gets tricky. Take a look at the screenshots below of the same section of the Preferences dialog. Unless you look carefully at the wording of the heading in your Preferences dialog you could easily miss the fact that some preferences are Global applying across all projects while others are limited to the Project file currently open in Captivate. The trick here is that you can only set up Global Preferences when no Captivate project is open. If a project file is open, any changes to preference settings will only apply to that specific file and no others open at the same time, or in the future. General preferences. This section contains Global preferences. So make sure you set or change them without any project files open at the time, otherwise they will only apply to the CPTX or CPTL file currently being edited. Generate project backups. Fortunately, its rare for a Captivate project file to become corrupted to the point where it becomes impossible to open or use. For more information, check the topic on my website about recovering Captivate projects from backup. Perhaps the easiest way to protect your project is just to set the Global Preference General Settings Generate Project Backup option its deselected by default, and then make sure you save and close your project often. This will at least allow you to get back to that last saved state to avoid disaster. One thing to remember here though is that once you turn on the Generate Project Backup option, the backup file is not created until you save your project for the second time. So its a good idea not to wait too long before doing save and close to ensure your backup file exists at all times from then on. Set Default Locations to point to local drive folders. When Captivate is first installed, the Preferences General Settings Default Locations Publish At and Project Cache locations default to special folders inside the My Documents folder of your user profile. If you work in a corporate networked environment you may be well advised to change these default settings to point to new folders on your C drive, as shown below. Why would this be necessary Its because, more and more corporate IT departments are employing virtualization technologies and roaming user profiles, which means the users profile and My Documents folder may actually reside on a LAN server instead of on their PC hard drive. This practice is usually adopted to make it easier for the IT department to manage and protect company information assets. However, while these techniques do not bother most software applications, they will eventually land you in trouble with Adobe Captivate. Turn off autosize and calculate options. These options are found under Preferences Default and are usually on by default. Quite frankly theyre a nuisance. They automatically change the size or timing of screen objects such as buttons or captions after editing. If they are on, you can never relax when editing because you have to go back and check the the size of objects as well as their timeline duration anytime you make a change. Recording preferences. These preferences mostly relate directly to how Captivate behaves when capturing simulations. You can save yourself a lot of time and angst by changing a few of these settings. Full Motion Recording FMRAnytime you use Video Demo Recording also known as Full Motion Recording or FMR in Cp versions prior to Cp 6, Captivate stores temporary files in a special folder buried several layers down inside your user profile. Unless you know this location and periodically clean it out, these files can build up over time to become a significant drain on your hard drive space. So set your Working Folder to a location you can easily find and clean out without having to worry about affecting any other part of your system. By default the Video Colour Mode is set to 1. This limits your captured graphics to 2. You should change this to 3. Additionally, if you start with 3. However, if you start out at 1. Recording keys. This one is just a personal preference of mine but you might like to try it too. I find that Captivate doesnt pick up every on screen event during automated capture especially for certain types of ERP software and you still need to hit the capture key sometimes to ensure you capture everything you need. Since Im right handed, I use the mouse with my right hand and like to capture manual screens with my left hand. Captivates default manual capture key is the Print. Screen key, which is usually on the right side of the keyboard. So, I change the default manual capture key to F2 because its closer to my left hand. Most of the other default recording keys are fine. Default recording objects. Another personal preference of mineIn practice I end up deleting 9. Demonstration mode screen capture session. So, I find it quicker overall to turn off both of these options and just add in the objects I want later. Tip Customising the text in added text captions. The default text in text captions added during a capture session is governed by a template with. Theres one template for each language supported by Captivate and if youre using Cp. Cp install folder at C Program FilesAdobeAdobe Captivate 6 x. C Program Files x. AdobeAdobe Captivate 6 3. Bit You can open this file in Notepad be sure to back it up first and edit object definitions. This makes it possible to gain greater control over object inserted during capture. But it wont remove the necessity to still delete all the extra objects Captivate tends to add. Project preferences. Now that weve taken care of global level preferences, its time to look at preferences that only apply to the specific project file currently open in Captivate. Its best to set these preferences in any Captivate template file on which you base your projects, otherwise youll need to set them up each time you begin a new file. Project information. This is not something that will necessarily prevent issues in Captivate, but adding appropriate information in the project settings can certainly help the next developer that happens to inherit the job of maintaining or editing your work. For example, if youve been really clever with variables, advanced actions, or widgets, but neglected to leave any documentation, the maintenance developer can perhaps at least look in the Project Information fields to identify the Author and then contact you via your Email address to ask any relevant questions about how you set up the project. WARNING Dont use punctuation marks in Project Information fields. Whatever text you add into these Project Information fields should NOT contain illegal characters, which can include certain punctuation characters that form part of programming languages. If you DO happen to inadvertently add these characters, you may find your project corrupts or refuses to publish. The error message will not indicate the cause of the issue as being anything related to Project Information, but it might mention something about using reserved keywords. Ive never been able to get a definitive list of words or characters that can cause problems, so its just safer to avoid punctuation altogether. SWF size and quality. Captivates compression options have been known to cause issues in published content, so you need to be aware of the three preference checkboxes on this particular screen that deal with compression.
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