Question about Project Size - Can you make it scalable?

[Guest]

Hello!  I have created a presentation in Captivate that is 1024 x 768.  My colleagues are saying that it is too big on their screens.  I know that I can export it as a smaller size if necessary, but is there a way to make the project scalable?  In my past experience I thought that flash was scalable, but this project seems to be a fixed size.  Thank you in advance for your help!  I am on Cp 5.5 for Mac.

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Welcome to our community

Sorry, but Captivate files aren't scalable. They are composed of raster images. Most Flash things are vector images so they are scalable. But not Captivate.

Cheers.,.. Rick

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[Guest]

Thank you!  At least I can stop trying to figure out how to make it work.

[RodWard]

You can resize your project, but you will lose some image quality.  It won't be anywhere near as crisp.  So if you resize software screen captures the text will look fuzzy.

If your project is NOT related to software screen capture tutorials but consists of other types of content (images, text captions, Flash animations etc) then you can resize the project and just keep all the objects the same size but move them more to the middle to allow for the reduction.  That way you don't lose any resolution quality.

So what kind of content is it that you're dealing with?

If your end user audience is running monitors at 1024 x 768 pixels, it's not usually a good idea to set your project to that size because you need to allow for browser chrome, toolbars etc.  For that monitor resolution, I usually set my projects to 995x627 pixels and I insert some CSS code into the HTM templates to eliminate the surrounding blank border space.  That allows for all the extra stuff that surrounds the actual Captivate presentation.

[Guest]

RodWard,

That is a helpful suggestion.  I didn't factor in the browser size, etc.  That is probably why it is getting cut off on their screens.

The content is mostly text and images with some flash videos in it.   Maybe I can re-import the screen captures images after I resize it.  I've got over 130 slides so I don't want to go through and reformat each one.

Thanks very much for your help!

[AndyKingInOC]

you can also try changing the dimensions in the html file associated with the swf.

Open the file with notepad or your text editor of choice and look for something like this line:

var so = new SWFObject(strURLFile + strURLParams, "Captivate", "1101", "800", "10", "#CCCCCC");

the two numbers after "Captivate" are the pixel dimensions of the swf movie.  If you change it to this:

var so = new SWFObject(strURLFile + strURLParams, "Captivate", "100%", "100%", "10", "#CCCCCC");

It will resize the movie to fit the height or width, whichever is shortest and keep the movie in proportion.  You will absolutely want to save the file and test it out, but I've had some sucess when 'shrinking' something a small amount.  My experience recently was the player controls/progress bar were cutoff on some users laptops and adjusting the height/width resolved it.  I wouldn't want to try and shrink something down too far, so your mileage may vary.