Adding a variable to a text caption changes formatting?

Hi Lori

Indeed that is a known issue with Captivate. The reason it occurs is somewhat technical according to the development team. It has to do with a number of variables and I'm not sure I understand all of it as it's dealing with different ways of rendering the font.

Below is the explanation I saw:

In CP4 text captions on stage are rendered using windows RTF control. In SWF, generally they are either rendered as  a) bitmaps or b) definetext depending upon an option (see last paragraph). However, when variables are added into text captions, we convert RTF to HTML and use dynamic text in SWF to render the HTML. This is done because “a” and “b” options above cannot predict the value of “variable” text. Since, HTML rendering is quite different from RTF, so we can see these issues... There is nothing much that can be done regarding this issue. However, I could find that there is a transparent text in first slide. In such case, by default, transparent text is going to SWF in the DefineText route and is visibly looking different. The same issue will occur in question slide text captions. If user turns off Preferences->Project->SWF Size and Quality->Anti-alias Transparent Captions, then the transparent text will be rendered as bitmap in SWF and will look same as on stage.

Hope this helps a smidge... Rick