Übercool Authoring Tools

If you refer to Adobe documentation on the web, you know you can sign in with your Adobe ID and add your comments to any Help topic. Experts designated as moderators answer your queries.
With the release of Adobe Community Publishing 1.1 beta, Adobe has taken another huge step in encouraging community participation.
Community members can contribute tips, movies, code snippets and more with easy-to-use templates. Contributions are moderated by community experts. Plus, everyone in the community can rate and comment on contributions.
To add a contribution, follow these steps:

1. Download the Community Publishing app: http://www.adobe.com/community/publishing/download.html


2. Author your tip using a simple template


3. Publish it to adobe.com

Check out this useful tip added recently by RoboHelp moderator Peter Grainge.

For all tips, see http://www.adobe.com/community/publishing.

Posted by Nandini Gupta at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone who creates computer-based tutorials for a client knows the kind of effort that goes into applying a consistent style, in on-screen text as well as visuals. If you are using Captivate to create these tutorials, there are many ways you can reduce post-production editing time.

One of the least-known ways is perhaps the way to change the default captions added by Captivate for various actions you record.

Let’s say the default caption for clicking a menu is “Select the menu” and the style mandated by your client is “Click ”. Instead of editing the captions after you complete recording, you can minimize your editing time by editing the template file from which Captivate sources the default captions.
This file is CaptureTextTemplates_English.rdl, and can be found in your Captivate installation. Open the file in any text editor (wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could edit this file from within Captivate?) and modify the captions as you wish. Save and start recording.
The Captivate team shares many smart tips and tricks on their blog. Here are some of my favorites:
How to create training and assessment modules from one Captivate project
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/06/reduce_your_editing_hours_crea.html

How to set default timing and transition properties and use them across slides, projects and sessions
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/03/rapid_elearning_authoring_is_t.html

Posted by Nandini Gupta at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)