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Question

How do I embed fonts into Captivate projects?

Forum|Forum|19 years ago
March 30, 2007
6 replies
8011 views

This question came up in May 2006 but was never really answered. I'd like to know how to embed fonts into my Captivate projects so that the output looks the same on all computers. While the text animations are fine, the Text Caption fields are the ones that seem to have fonts that go walkies on other computers. I know you can embed fonts in PDFs. Why not in Captivate (unless I'm missing something in 2.0).

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ananggadipa

Participating Frequently

Captivate should made easier to embed font, or at least TypeKit.

I personally think one of the major reason almost all Captivate project I ever saw is not beatifully designed is because of the bad typography.

Just my two cents.

F

foodi

Participating Frequently

Agreed!

R

Rares Neamtiu

Known Participant

Font "embeding" workaround:

1. Get webfont or convert it using http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator or https://www.web-font-generator.com/

2. Open zip file from generator and put actual font name in "styles.css" where the "font-family" is. Generators usually give it a websafe name.

3. Upload all generated files to "PROJECT_NAME/assets/font/".

4. Open "PROJECT_NAME/assets/css/CPLibraryAll.css" and add "@import url("../font/styles.css");" to the beginning of the file.

Note: Alternatively for step 2 we can change the font name in "PROJECT_NAME/assets/js/CPM.js". The idea is that font names must match in both files.

wc3

Inspiring

IN CP 7

When you compile/publish your project to SWF fonts will embed and all will hopefully work as it should... ACCEPT;

What will NOT work is if you are using non web supported fonts in WIDGETS.

Captivate Widgets do NOT support non google type fonts so your fancy fonts that you have used in your widgets will NOT embed when the project is compiled and the internet browser will not display them correctly. The browser will default widget fonts to whatever the internet browser is set to. If you are using widgets, like I used to, and wish to use non google/web fonts in your widgets, you're pretty much buggered.

As far as I know it can't be fixed.

The only challenge with this is that compiling/publishing to SWF is NOT supported by any mobile device. So, if you compile your course to SWF, an ipad or iphone won't be able to load your course. Why? SWF isn't currently supported by mobile devices.

But, if you compile/publish your course to HTML5, then all is good. ACCEPT that you cant use any swf elements or animations in your course when publishing to HTML5. So if you want to run your cool swf animated course on a mobile device, your buggered or as my Dad used to say.. S.O.L.

Summary:

Want to use non web/google fonts in your course? Don't use widgets.
Want to use flash elements and swf in your course? Be aware that it can't be loaded/used on a mobile device.
Want your course to be mobile ready? Then you can't use any flash/swf elements in your course. HTML5 doesn't support it.

wc3

Inspiring

So can you or can you NOT embed fonts into Captivate?

I am using a "chalkboard" font in my course/project. Whenever anyone looks at this course without havng that font on their computer they see their default font.

My question is: If you CANT embed fonts into a Captivate project.. why the "F" can you select other fonts that are non "internet" fonts in the first place? SHouldnt there be something in the program telling you this?

F

foodi

Participating Frequently

Did anyone ever resolve this issue? I've done a significant amount of work building a project with appropriate typography only to find that the exported file doesn't support any of the fonts. This is an absolutely atrocious oversight. I completely agree that if embedding fonts is in fact (and completely unacceptably) impossible, then why on earth does Captivate allow us to choose non-system fonts in our projects?

A

Anonymous

Yeah I think the basic problem is that the text boxes in the captivate editor are not exactly the same as the final output, causing the wrapping to differ. My experience is that the output line widths are one or two letters wider than appears in the editor, so a short word wrapped to the next line in the editor may appear at the end of the previous line when published.

If you don't have to make all your text boxes the same size, I usually size the width until the lines of text don't change with three or more letters width variation, but the only way to make sure is to preview the slide.

Now text entry boxes are another matter altogether. It's a real shame Captivate doesn't use the vector and text capabilities of Flash at all.

Captiv8r

Legend

Hi Scott

It's a real shame Captivate doesn't use the vector and text capabilities of Flash at all.

This is because to Captivate, all the world is bitmapped images. Be they in .BMP, .GIF, .JPG, .TIF, .PNG and other formats.

One thing that causes things to look different in output as opposed to the editor can be the .DPI setting in Windows. You get there by right-clicking the desktop. Then click Properties > Settings tab > Advanced button > General tab. There you should see a drop-down for DPI setting. I've seen a few instances where this value was changed from perhaps 96 to 120 DPI and it screwed with the output, cutting off text captions and whatnot.

Cheers... Rick

C

CharinosAuthor

Known Participant

Link to the old thread on this topic is here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=67&catid=464&threadid=1155553&highlight_key=y&keyword1=embed

And yes, this happens for my EXE AND my SWF output. For example, I had a slide with a Text Caption of six lines, the last line of which had a widow. I resized the caption to eliminate the widow (the last line now has three words instead of one). I resaved my project and then republished it as an SWF. The widow is back on the slide. Reopening the project -- no widow on that slide. What gives?

I then tried publishing to SWF with both Compression and Advanced Compression turned off, but the same thing happened.

I wish there was a way to flatten slide layers in Captivate like you can in Photoshop, thus preserving the slide content as a single image and avoid the font-swapping business altogether.

CatBandit

Inspiring

First, a tip for the forums: If you use the URL tags, your post won't require horizontal scrolling - sorry, but I use Firefox and entering a long URL totally blows my ability to smoothly read the post ... you can manually add a text link by using the "L" tag as shown below (I've put spaces in to avoid this being turned into another text link)

[ L = Your Text] http://www.yourdomain.com [ / L ]

Back to your issue, Charinos. I'm glad you did find the URL, but that thread and your problem are not even in the same world. That thread deals with fonts in text-entry boxes (boxes for end-user text-entry), and you are talking about text-captions, an entirely different object.

In fact, if you make changes and save those changes to a text-caption, then publish the project, the fonts in your text captions will remain stable and are not dependent on the fonts installed on the end-viewer's machine. The reason is that when the SWF is compiled, the text captions are converted to images and so long as the file is viewed as intended in the HTML document - at the proper size - the stretching you describe cannot take place. I'm not saying you are seeing things, but if my understandings of the Captivate machine are correct, what you are saying is happening cannot be happening. Something else is going on, like a failure to save changes, use of non-conforming text-caption boxes with a resultant loss of margins, or something.

Sorry I'm not more help. I can't duplicate what you are seeing but I hope someone else can help you out - I may still be misunderstanding your issue.
.

CatBandit

Inspiring

Huh? Are you saying that you publish to SWF and the output appears differently on different computers? Nuh uh ... I just don't think so.

Maybe I've totally misunderstood. Please provide a link to the question of May, 2006 so I can try to figure out what i"m missing. Thanks!
.

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