Captivate 8 - project resolution / output size issues

[jamess32151815]

I'm having problems with the correct/best size for my Captivate projects.  My organisation mainly uses 24 inch widescreen monitors, which are set to 1920x1080 - although I don't even know if this is relevant to how published content appears in the browser??

If the Captivate project is set to 640x480, for example, it's unusable - far too small to navigate and read text.  Even if I rescale it out to the maximum preset size of 1280x720 it's usable but not ideal for displaying videos, for example. 

Obviously 1280 is still less than 1920 default of the monitor...

Some users are stuck on older 19 inch square monitors, so I need to cater for them too.  We are also stuck using Internet Explorer 8 (and hence .swf output), which may be another complicating factor??  What is the ideal output resolution considering all of the above??

Thanks,

James

[Erik Lord]

Unless you want to dig into the Responsive Design features of Captivate (which you can't do if you're stuck on IE8), you need to identify a minimum screen resolution.

Plainly, as you say, 1920x1080 isn't going to work for those with smaller monitors...so what's the max size those monitors support?

Likely 1024x768, I'd guess.

So then you have to consider the browser UI and the space that takes up....which generally leaves you with about 900 pixels wide and 650 pixels high. I'd suggest making a sample piece at that size and see how that works (with the various elements you'd typically include) on the smaller monitors your audience has.

You could set the piece to 'scale' in the publish settings, so you could design for the smaller resolution then blow it up large for bigger screens/browser sizes, but that tends to make images blurry. You could design for larger screens and scale down for the smaller ones, but then those smaller-screen folks will have tiny text to read.

So best to find the 'minimum size' and design for that, and leave it at that...