Captivate 11.8.1 Caption Issues on Mac

Report · Jun 13, 2023

We recently updated to Captivate 11.8.1 because our Mac users will be going to Ventura. We are now having problems with our closed captioning. The text is black no matter what color you set it in the settings.

This does NOT happen on the 11.8.1 version for Windows, so it's obviously Mac related. We are stuck with this version and we caption all our training which will be going live in a month. Anyone have a fix or a workaround?

Report · Jun 13, 2023

Update to my original post. It looks like only existing captions are affected. We changed our template dimentions and a few other items so we had to bring over existing slide content and update the theme. In order to save production time we preserved the existing audio and captions. A few slides did have to be created from scratch and then manually captioned. Those captions pick up the project caption settings and work just fine.

Again, this happens only on the Mac side with the latest update. For now we'll have the Windows users on the team do our publishing, but that's not a viable long-term solution, so hopefully this will be fixed.

Report · Jun 20, 2023

I guess no one has any ideas, but I'll continue to post updates. I found a way to fix the problem post publishing in the CPM.js, but that's another short term solution. This affects half my development team and will cause major delays in our schedule so if anyone anywhere has any ideas, I'm game!

Report · Aug 28, 2025

How did you fix the problem post publishing? I am experiencing the same issue, mac only.

Report · Sep 02, 2025

I'll explain what I did, but I also want to mention that Adobe pushed out an update to 11.8.1 that fixed the problem on my Mac. If you are running the latest Mac version, you should be ok. However, if you still need to do it post publishing, here's what I did:

Open the published file directory (non-zip)
Open the CPM.js file (located inside assets/js)
Use a text editor to search for "cp-actualText" to find all the captions in the code. You should see the color of the text after the line-height attribute. For example: <span class="cp-actualText" style="line-height:120%;color:#000000;font-size:18px;... (this indicates the text is black)
Do a search/replace in the file to change the hex color from black to white, so change to "color:#ffffff"

I caution you to not just search/replace the "color:#000000" part because there could be other areas that have that setting and you only want to change the caption color, so I usually copy more of the line of code that include something custom to the captions like the font size or include the beginning of the line up to that point.