Resolution / Screen Area; Best Choice Suggestions?

[cegrubb]

Rick or others with insight,

Been working with Captivate for several years but haven't properly understood or solved a dilemma of ensuring a produced module appears on all desktops at a size where our employees do not have to scroll up/down or left/right to see the entire presentation.  I did a search of the forums but couldn't find a similar topic.

Can someone help me understand Screen Area (Resolution)?

800 x 600 seems too small and doesn't provide a great deal of working area.  Images of our applications are difficult to read and when enlarged, text becomes fuzzy and less than professional.

1024 x 768 is too large and requires scrolling.

To compound the problem, our eLearning is utilized across the globe in locations like Dublin, Shanghai, Brazil, Kuala Lumpur, Costa Rica, etc. etc.  Not sure if it makes a difference or not but we primarily use 19" Dell Monitors.

Am I just missing something very simplistic here or is there a solution that makes our curriculum viewable for the vast majority without the need to scroll?

I'll apologize in advance for this basic question.  I'm a bit embarrassed for even asking but can't figure it out.

Chuck

[Captiv8r]

Hi Chuck

The size of the monitor is of no consequence other than the fact that larger monitors tend to offer more resolutions to choose from.

What you have described would seem to cry out for you to determine the lowest common denominator. If you want your presentations to be pixel perfect on any monitor that is used in your user base, you have to determine the smallest resolution in use and cater to that. I'm sure 800x600 will seem too small. But keep in mind that the larger your resolution, not only do you run the risk of your end user having to scroll to see all of your presentation, but the more space it will consume on the server or hard drive and that translates directly to the length of time it will take to download to the end user's PC.

I'm sure Rod or Lilybiri will have other and better information to offer here as well.

Cheers... Rick

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[RodWard]

If it's any help, I spent quite a bit of trial and error working out the perfect screen size for Captivate projects where your lowest target audience screen resolution was 1024x768 AND you needed to allow for LMS SCORM Players taking up some real estate as well (even when you launched the content in a separate browser window.

The ideal size I found, and which I still continue to use years later, is 995 x 627 pixels.  I have a 30 pixel Captivate playbar added underneath this, which gives an overall height inside the browser of 657 pixels.

Try it out and see if it works for your circumstances.  There are some software apps that still don't fit in these dimensions (e.g. trying to capture Captivate itself is a nightmare under 1200 pixels wide) but almost all do.