Can I set a solid fill color on caption boxes?

You have to remember that Captivate splits the caption graphic into four equal quadrants... any space you add for an arrow on one side must also be added to the other side or you risk Captivate chopping the graphic in a place you don't want it to.

Use your "transparency" color outside the border on the non-arrow side to balance the size and ensure the caption splits right down the middle of the "text caption" part of the image. The image itself will be bigger but due to the extra space being added as transparency, the perceived size of the text caption itself won't change. When adding the arrow and transparency, don't forget to increase the margins in the .fcm file to account for the increased size.

For example, if your arrow adds 7 pixels to the left side of your graphic, your minimum width would be:

7 pixel arrow + 1 pixel border + 2 pixel fillcolor + 1 pixel border + 7 pixel transparency color

In the .fcm file, change the left and right margin to 9 to center the text in the text caption area (or more, if you don't want your text right up against the border, although adding extra padding also increases the minimum caption width).

Unfortunately, you must think in two dimensions at all times... in the scenario above, your minimum caption height is: (height of the arrow x 2) + 2 pixels. Captivate also splits the caption horizontally, so the arrow must be completely above or below the split line (hence arrow height x 2) plus two pixels more that straddle the split line and can be replicated to "fill in the gaps" when the caption is resized larger.

If all this is too much to grasp, you can think outside the box and use a pointerless caption that works in concert with an inserted arrow graphic. Give the arrow the same fillcolor as the caption and an outline with the same width & color as the caption border, but DON'T add an outline on the flat edge where the arrow would normally be attached to the caption.

Manually align the arrow graphic so that it sits above the caption and overlaps the border by one pixel and it will look like it's "attached". The keyboard arrow keys are going to be your best friend when lining things up.

It's more work on each slide, but if you don't get too fancy, the effect is pretty convincing. It also lets you create all kinds of fancy directional arrows without futzing around with caption sizing and padding.

Thanks for the replies. My problem with the images that I've looked at, even though I like them, is that they have minimum sizes that are too big for what I'm doing. The basic choices for caption types, such as Adobe Red, have flexible size but no way that I see to alter the fill color from white. What I'm hoping for would behave like a shape in a draw program-- just a border and fill with no other detailing. Any way to do it?

Oops, sorry about that! My bad. Guess my coffee hadn't yet kicked in!

Basically you may use any image you wish. So try creating a custom caption bitmap image using something like Microsoft Paint. Then you could change to a custom caption type and point at your solid box.

Cheers... Rick