Publishing a SWF via Remote Desktop can yield different results

[rw-media]

Thought I would share: much to my surprise, I noticed today that it appears that publishing a SWF via a Remote Desktop Connection can actually have an effect on the resulting SWF, in terms of how it renders.  Specifically, in my case, when publishing while connected to the system via RDC, I noticed that the text on bullets were not anti-aliased (leaving the text jagged).  When I published directly from the system itself, without RDC, the text in the bullets displayed anti-aliased and looked proper.

I was extremely surprised to see this be the case at first, but it must be that using RDC has some effect on the graphic resources of the system publishing the SWF.  I had always assumed that the processing of a computer would run the same via remote connection, but this tells me that there are subtle differences.

The aliasing of the text was the only difference between the two different publishing situations, but I am sure others may run into situations where certain aspects of their SWF may render differently if they are remotely connecting from another system.  Thought I'd share in case anyone has run into this, or anyone does run into this...

[Isometric_Bacon]

As far as I understand, Captivate does its text rendering by taking screen captures of the text you've entered in the module, which is shown in the way it displays in your operating environment. (this is why depending on your operating system, or skin, the default captivate 'continue' buttons look different). For the most part, it takes pictures of flash based text, which is vector based, and hence anti aliased. (no blocky edges)

What that means, basically, is the text is made into an image, based on how your computer displays it. Since you're running on Remote Desktop, which has lower quality image settings to make up for the fact your accessing your computer remotely, the text is publishing as aliased.

See if you can right click your desktop -> properties -> appearance -> effects -> and turn on the option to use cleartype to smooth fonts, (inside the remote desktopped computer) and see if that works when republishing.

If that doesn't work, it may be because Captivate does some wierd things when you add bullet points to text boxes. I believe this is because Flash doesn't have bullet points built in, and it bitmaps the text to provide that functionality. In the past, i've gotten around this by not using Captivates bullet points at all, and using ASCII characters instead, with manual indenting of characters. (Painful, but it works!)

[rw-media]

Thanks for the feedback, thats very helpful stuff.  Your explanation makes a lot of sense now as to why we were getting those results.  I may run some tests changing the settings you mention or the settings on the RDC connection, and I am pretty sure that will make the difference.

That's also a good point about the bullets - I think in this case its more tied to the settings mentioned above, but it is worth noting that the bullets were treated differently than other text.