Custom Text Caption Style in CP8

[jeffc57]

Hello all,

I am hoping someone out there has an answer on this, or perhaps a creative work around. I am trying to create 2 text caption styles that use my company's colors. I found a version-agnostic document that seemed to suggest a solid color caption box could be created in PhotoShop, saved in the Captions sub-folder of the Gallery folder, and then used from the drop down list of available styles, so long as you saved the bmp file with the correct syntax i.e. newstyle1.bmp. When I did this, sure enough, the new style showed up in the style options list, but they are transparent. No color at all. After at least an hour chatting with an on-line tech, the answer was that no, you cannot create custom text caption styles, and are limited to the ones that install out of the box.  Seems odd to me.

What I did notice is that all of the pre-populated styles have in addition to their .bmp file, a file with the same name and an extension of FCM. Hmmm. I opened one using notepad and discovered that this file seems to contain size and other data for the caption style. How this FCM file gets created I have no idea.

Does anyone know a creative solution? I guess I can just use a rectangle smartshape and enter text on it.

Jeff C

[Captiv8r]

Hi Jeff

You need to create either a slightly smaller version or a slightly larger version of each of the images. Then what you do is make an area that surrounds the desired image and uses a color that isn't part of the image. Often, we see hot pink or bright green used. Any color will work, really. The transparent color is the color appearing in the upper left pixel of the image. Coordinate 0, 0 on the grid.

Just open the Captivate Gallery and look at one of the existing captions. I'll post one below.

Cheers... Rick

[Lilybiri]

Rick will expect me to add a comment. If you want text captions, he is the expert. Myself I replace all captions by shapes, because they can be formatted in Captivate, you can move the 'spike' (don't know the exact term) wherever you want, you can edit the form, insert images, textures, gradients, solid colors and choose a stroke. It is now possible in 8.0.1 to replace all feedback captions automatically by shapes, even on Quiz slides. The Quizzing objects in the Object Style Manager (my preferred starting point when creating a theme) do have a Smartshape section. Moreover, in case you need it, turning a shape into a button is so easy.

And now Rick is again smiling....