Text2Speech,Pronunciation

Adobe Captivate 4 Text-to-Speech feature gives a Dictionary Editor tool to add or change the pronunciation for a word. This tool is available at <Adobe Captivate Installation Dir>\VT\<agent>\M16\bin\UserDicEng.exe. The default version of this tool is not unlocked. So when a word is added/changed and its pronunciation is tested, it announces that it is a trial license. This post explains how to fix this. Follow the steps below to correct this problem in your installation -

1. Open the Windows Explorer and browser to the directory where Adobe Captivate is installed. By default it is 'C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4'.

2. If the Text-to-Speech engine is installed, then there will be a 'VT' directory in this directory. This directory will have directories for 'Kate' and 'Paul' agents.

3. Go to directory 'VT/Kate/M16/bin' directory.

4. Rename the 'UserDicEng.exe' as 'UserDicEng_backup.exe'.

5. Download the new UserDicEng.exe file from here and put it in this directory.

6. Repeat the same steps for 'Paul' agent.

Now, you should not hear the trial license message when you add/change the pronunciation of any word.

Quick Tip - We have seen that 'Create' is not pronounced properly by the speech engine. So, you can fix this by specifying the target as 'cree ate' for this source word 'create'.

Posted by Ashish Garg at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Variables in Adobe Captivate act as placeholders for data. The relevant data is associated with the variable during user input or when the output SWF is played. Adobe Capativate supports two types of variables:

• System Variables: These are pre-defined variables, which carry a Captivate movie’s information. In Adobe Captivate, system variables are classified as follows:
• MovieControl: variables for events that control the movie like pause, resume, previous, next slide, and so on.
• MovieInformation: variables related to the movie such as variables for the current slide, current frame, and so on.
• MovieMetaData: variables that provide information about the project such as project name, author, and company.
• SystemInformation: variables that can be picked up from your computer such as current date and current time.
• Quizzing: variables related to quizzing, such as the variables that capture the number of attempts and the percentage of questions answered correctly.

The exhaustive list of System variables is enumerated in this post

• User Variables: Variables that you create and to which you assign a name and value. You can use user-defined variables to store data that is used or updated many times in the Adobe Captivate project. Each variable has a unique name, and a value corresponding to the text that is stored in it. When you modify the value of a variable, the changes to the corresponding text are reflected throughout the project.

How to create user variables:

• Goto ‘Project’ menu.
• Select ‘Actions’ menu-item. The actions dialog comes up what is shown below.

So now you have created your variable. This variable is nothing but a user variable.

Information about system variables:

To know about them you just need to select “System” in the “Type” dropdown in the actions dialog:

Now that you know about User and System variables the next obvious question would be ‘what can I do with these variables?’ Well, you could do many things with these variables, which I shall explain in detail in my future posts. As of now I will tell you two basic usecases for variables:

• Show variables in a Text Caption.
• Show variables in a Drawing Toolbar Objects.

Show variable in a Text Caption:

Consider a case where-in you want to show ‘current slide of the total slide’ information in your project. For example, if your project has 10 slides and if user is on the first slide, this information would look like: 1 of 10.

• Insert a text caption.

 

Show variables in Drawing Toolbar objects:

• Draw a rectangle.
• Select the rectangle and press “F2”. The TextEdit toolbar comes up.

 

I am sure that this post would have helped you to break ice with Variables.In my upcoming posts I will tell you about Advanced Actions. Once you get a hold of Advanced Actions, then we would discuss the ‘what and how’ of variables and Advanced Actions in Adobe Captivate 4. Till then I encourage you to try a date with variables!!

Variables,Advanced Actions,Adobe Captivate 4,system variables

Posted by Manish Anand at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Some of you had written enquiring about the recording to RJ’s webinar on Captivate 4 (from July 17th). Good news! This was recorded and can be accessed here. Considering the amount of material RJ covers in a webinar, I’m sure even those who attended the session will find this to be good reference material.

RJ will also be conducting another webinar on the Adobe eLearning Suite. In this webinar, you will explore how you can leverage each of the 9 major Adobe applications in the eLearning Suite for rapid eLearning, courseware authoring, simulations, and media editing. This should serve as a great launching pad for those of you who are new to the eLearning Suite, or are planning to evaluate it in the near future. You can register for this conference by following this link.

When: Friday, August 14th, 2009. 10 AM US/Pacific

adobe elearning suite webinar,adobe captivate webinar

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Have you ever felt the need of sending an e-mail notification as soon as a course or a captivate demonstration is over. We know about the “Send E-Mail” button in the Results slide but what if there are no question slides or quiz in your project??

Here is how you could do this very easily using the following steps:

1. Add a question slide and then remove the quiz slide so that only the result slide remains. In the result slide delete everything and just have"Continue" and "Send E-mail" butons. Add a caption saying "Click the button blah...blah to send the progress etc."

2. Remove the playbar (scrubber) so that the end user has to go thru each of the slides in the demo project.

3. In the Quiz->Reporting->E-Mail and enter the email id of the person to whom the mail needs to be sent.

4. In this case he shall get an e-mail with the scores showing 0, 0, 0, but he shall get an intimation saying that a particular user has completed the course. But if he wants to make it more readable he needs to change the “email_attach.htm" which can be found at InstallDirectory\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\Templates\Publish and change the parameters for:

function sendMail()

{

      var  konq, saf, moz;

      document.emailForm.action = 'mailto:' + gstrEmailTo + '?subject=' + gstrEmailSubject

      document.emailForm.elements["Results"].value = "\r" + gstrEmailBody;

      konq = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( 'Konqueror' ) != -1 );

      saf = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( 'Safari' ) != -1 );

      moz = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( 'Gecko' ) != -1 && !saf && !konq);

      if(moz)

      {

            document.emailForm.enctype = 'text/plain';

      }

      document.emailForm.submit();

}

So, try this to see if its helpful.

Posted by Sikandar Pradhan at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

RJ, our eLearning evangelist, will be conducting a live eLearning session on ‘Adobe Captivate 4 for new users'. This is specifically designed for Captivate novices. Here you will acquire the knowledge you need for getting started using Adobe Captivate 4. In this 90 minute interactive session, you will learn about the different types of eLearning projects you can create in the product, including software simulations, scenario-based training, quizzes and others. RJ's sessions are always packed with information and very interactive; hence they also tend to get filled very early. So if you've just purchased Captivate 4 or the Adobe eLearning Suite, or are testing out the trial, you should plan to attend this session.

To quote RJ: "... please keep in mind that my Connect Pro room only handles 400 people, so please log in as early as 30 minutes before the start time and the Virtual Classroom doors will close promptly at 10am PST to avoid distractions."

When: 7/17/2009, 10am Pacific Time, 90 minutes

Register here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=1505503&loc=en_us

Captivate webinar,captivate e-seminar

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

A lot of legacy learning content is in PowerPoint format and it is natural that e-learning course authors want to leverage or re-use this content. The earlier versions of Captivate allowed users to import their PowerPoint content into their Captivate projects. Now Captivate 4 goes much further- Cp4 now supports full round-tripping with the PowerPoint content.
It supports collaborative authoring with the SME's who use PowerPoint. Detailed below are some key aspects of this powerful feature:

- You can import PowerPoint slides to Captivate, and then enhance these slides by adding audio, animations, video or other Captivate objects to each of the slides. In the meantime your co-author can keep editing the slides using MS PowerPoint. You can synch your Captivate project with the latest version of the PowerPoint slide deck using the ‘update’ feature (Window > Library and select the presentation, right-clik and do "update") . The Captivate objects which you added earlier on-top of the initial version of the PowerPoint slides remain intact (while Captivate updates to the changes your co-author made using PowerPoint). The workflow becomes even more powerful if you keep this PowerPoint file in a shared location, eliminating the need of sending back the file to Captivate user.

- Note that this feature works for both .ppt and .pptx files. This is being clarified here as I saw many articles describing this as possible only in PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) files. .ppt and .pptx are handled in the same manner in Captivate 4.

- These posts give some more insight into the feature: PowerPoint Linked vs Embedded Import, Best practices for handling PowerPoint audio in Captivate, Correct dimensions for Power Point Import, PowerPoint On-Click Animations

- Captivate help is also a good resource for the feature.

- This tutorial gives a lot of details.

Posted by Sony Kadavan at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Easter egg is a hidden feature of Adobe Captivate 4 which is no way related to the functionality of the product.
It is a flash demo which contains photos of a lot of people who worked quite hard to bring this versions of Adobe Captivate to you.

To access the feature go to Help->About Adobe Captivate, The about dialog will pop up.
Now press "End" key. Be patient! and there you go.

Posted by Arif Ali Saiyed at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)