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renovator99
renovator99
Known Participant
March 18, 2014
Answered

Pausing slides using master slides and widgets

  • March 18, 2014
  • 2 replies
  • 1155 views

Hi,

Is there a better way that what we are doing becuase we ware wasting time and we put this process in pace in CP 5.5 and want to know what we can better in CP7.01

We want to have our slides pause at the middle of each slide

Currently

- Our navigation buttons are on the master slide . These are custom static widgets to do forward and back because interactive objects cannot be put on master slides
- so we add a hidden object on each slide to pause

We have complicated branching becuase

- we have glossaries and help

- branched scenarios

So we really need this to work releiably

Problems

- our widget doesn't show on the branched viewer

- we make mistakes using the variable recording the previous viewed slide

We were worried about using a playbar becuase it
- allows you to exit assessments

- allows users to skip our simulations

regards Paul

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Lilybiri

Your statement '..because interactive objects cannot be put on master slides' is no longer valid since CP6: there is one type of interactive objects that can be used on master slides (or timed for the rest of the project) which are the shape buttons. I have been talking a lot about them:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/why-i-like-shape-buttons-captivate-6

http://blog.lilybiri.com/toggle-shape-buttons

http://blog.lilybiri.com/want-a-button-on-question-slide-in-captivate

And I presented a webinar, info and link can be found here: http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2012/09/training-lilybiris-favourite-shapes-to-trigger-advanced-actions.html

You could easily replace the static widgets by shape buttons, they are a lot easier to 'style' and very flexible.

One example: if you want just to pause each slide, add a pausing shape button (transparent fill and no stroke) to the main master slide. Because there is no timing possible for objects on a master slide, that pause will always occur at the end of the slide, whatever its duration. You cannot time the pause! If you have a shape button with pause timed for the rest of the project, that pausing point will always be at the same absolute time (relative is not possible, thought I'd seen somewhere a question about pausing at half the slide duration but cannot find it in your text).

I (almost) never use a playbar myself. It is only useful for simple linear projects.

Lilybiri

2 replies

TLCMediaDesign
TLCMediaDesign
Inspiring
March 18, 2014

If you are using custom widgets, you should be able to make every slide pause in the middle from within the widget. You can get the start frame and the end frame of the slide. Add an Enter Frame Event in Flash to listen for for the middle frame of the slide then pause.

If you display the widgets for the duration of the project they should always display regardless of branching. Also, I wouldn't put the widget on a master slide, but on the first slide and display for rest of project. There are anomolies that happen when changing slides.

Lilybiri
LilybiriCorrect answer
Legend
March 18, 2014

Your statement '..because interactive objects cannot be put on master slides' is no longer valid since CP6: there is one type of interactive objects that can be used on master slides (or timed for the rest of the project) which are the shape buttons. I have been talking a lot about them:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/why-i-like-shape-buttons-captivate-6

http://blog.lilybiri.com/toggle-shape-buttons

http://blog.lilybiri.com/want-a-button-on-question-slide-in-captivate

And I presented a webinar, info and link can be found here: http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2012/09/training-lilybiris-favourite-shapes-to-trigger-advanced-actions.html

You could easily replace the static widgets by shape buttons, they are a lot easier to 'style' and very flexible.

One example: if you want just to pause each slide, add a pausing shape button (transparent fill and no stroke) to the main master slide. Because there is no timing possible for objects on a master slide, that pause will always occur at the end of the slide, whatever its duration. You cannot time the pause! If you have a shape button with pause timed for the rest of the project, that pausing point will always be at the same absolute time (relative is not possible, thought I'd seen somewhere a question about pausing at half the slide duration but cannot find it in your text).

I (almost) never use a playbar myself. It is only useful for simple linear projects.

Lilybiri

renovator99
renovator99Author
Known Participant
March 28, 2014

Hi ,

We have taken Lilybiri's advice and used smart shapes as buttons on the master slide. The branching view feature works, and we can import images into the smart shape under Fill & Stroke, using the texture fill.
Our issues are
-  whether we can have different images for muting and unmuting.
-  will lots of rollovers etc cause problems with "Pause project until user clicks".

Also, although smart buttons in Master Slide don't have a Timing property, so you can't set a pause on the time-line, under Options you can click on "Pause project until user clicks". This seems to work pretty well for the (limited) testing that I've done. I don't know what happens if you have lots of objects like rollovers, buttons or click boxes on the slide (this is when the click box pause we've been using tends to fail.)

You can also (to my surprise) attach advanced actions to smart buttons on the master slide. The action list is more limited than on a regular slide, and for some reason won't let you show and hide objects. Initially I wrote an AA for the mute button which turns the audio on and off, but then I discovered there's a toggle feature in cap7 that does this automatically. Unfortunately because you can't use show and hide I can't have different buttons for muting/unmuting. Is there a solution for this ?


regards Renovator

RodWard
Community Expert
RodWardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 28, 2014

Show and hide will not be available because you can only Show/Hide objects that are on the current slide. Since there's no way for the program to know which slide you will be on when you click the button from the Master Slide, it cannot show you the list of available objects for that slide.

If you REALLY want to try pushing the boundaries here, one thing you might be able to test is to create a conditional action and execute that from the button on the master slide.  You can have one decision block per slide in your project, and set the condition to check the current slide number before showing or hiding objects that WOULD be available on that particular slide.  Since the object drop-downs in Standard and Conditional actions actually show you ALL objects in the project, this would to some extent get around the limitation imposed by trying to execute single actions to show or hide objects.

However, personally I think you will quickly tire of trying to set up such a complex conditional action just to accommodate what you are trying to do.  Your choice.

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