I was asked this question via email the other day and I just had to shake my head. No, not that someone asked it - I’m just amazed that after 3 releases of Captivate with this same problem, more people aren’t going ballistic over this bug. The problem is in using transparent captions. I hadn’t had a need to use them since the Captivate 1.0 days and just assumed that, but now, the problem was fixed. But it still isn’t. The current freelance project I’m working on is a combination slideshow/software demonstration, perfect for Captivate. Originally the slideshow was provided to me in PowerPoint, however because I prefer one source file and the client has a license and some training in Captivate, I rebuilt the slideshow in Captivate. A basic, white background was used at first, with black text. Since I just needed plain text with a white background, a transparent caption was used for each piece of text - straight text, bullets, numbered lists, etc. All are fuzzy.
Here is a screenshot of one:
Transparent Captions Still Result in Fuzzy Text
UPDATE: The screenshots in this article were taken with Snagit. The .gif output of the image above results in the black text above looking much sharper than the white/blue image below, but trust me when I say that in reality the white/blue looks much better!
(There are workarounds for this problem. The most popular one seems to be to highlight the text using the background color. This particular page says you only need to highlight one character with a gray highlight color, but I tried it and all I got was a single character with a gray highlight : (
Since I wanted to get away from the plain white background and go with a blue background (closer to what the client had originally provided me), I wound up doing the highlight workaround and using the same color as the background color for the highlight. But this is a real pain because every single piece of text has to be highlighted. The result is not crystal clear when loading into a flash-wrapper (as usual), but it’s still way better and is acceptable:
You can't tell, but the text is highlighted with the same blue as the background!
I’m kinda thinking that a better way to go about this is to simply create a custom caption and just using that. I’ll give it a try and post the .bmp files for it. It’ll be a snap to simply change the color of the .bmp files so they’ll be reusable. And the result should be much easier and better than having to go through every line of text and adding highlights to it. Ridiculous!
4 Comments
mark,
I regret to inform you that there is absolutely no known way (at least during the 10 kazillion hours that I’ve spent working with Captivate and Photoshop trying to fix this problem) to get that ‘transparent text box’ to work out right. I have tried creating my own and replacing it in the Adobe Captivate folders under ‘Program Files’. Nothing works. I ended up literally creating the various ‘text boxes’ individually in Photoshop. It was a time consuming nightmare. As an FYI, I have sent Adobe MULTIPLE notes about this as well as telling them to quit capturing the static backgrounds as BMP! The file size is huge!
Yeah I came to that same conclusion. For the project I was working on that required them (when I wrote this post), I wound up just using the ‘highlight everything’ workaround, and of course the entire time I’m sitting there doing this miserable hack I’m just cringing.
I would say that good things are on tap for Captivate 4, since there have been rumors from some decent sources that a Mac version of Captivate is on its way, but I think its bull**** since to do that would require a complete rewrite from scratch of Captivate. The current version uses Microsoft’s ActiveX libraries extensively (which is probably why it captures in BMP). A Mac version can’t, obviously, use ActiveX. And since Adobe is soliciting people now for the Captivate 4 Beta (invite me, please!), that tells me they’re fairly close to release by the end of the year and so there’s no way they rewrote it from scratch since Captivate 3 was released. But hey, I could be wrong! Hopefully!
One thing we have been doing to override this bug in Captivate is to put a simple bulletpoint in the text caption. If I have a text paragraph I just make a couple of blank lines below the last line of text and insert a single bullet point. On the scene I manipulate the textboxsize so that it doesn’t show the bullet point. That way the text is 100% sharp and crisp. This works for text sizes up to 12 points. Anything higher than that will still look like crap ;o)
More info and demonstration can be found here: http://www.captivate4.com/2008/12/01/fuzzyunreadable-text-in-adobe-captivate/
Michaels last blog post..Fuzzy/unreadable text in Adobe Captivate
Hi Michael,
I remember reading something about using bullets but when I tried it didn’t work for me. I’ll have to try it again soon using your technique.
Thanks!
mark
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