Code Syntax Highlighting

[clinti68368292]

Has anyone found/developed code syntax hightlighting for Captivate?

[Lilybiri]

Can you explain more in detail? There are some fine JS programmers around on this forum.

[clinti68368292]

Hi Lilybiri, RodWard and BDuckWorks,

First, thanks for your responses!

I'm not so much concerned with authoring javascript (I have my own preferred tools for that) but for displaying it in a slide. My company's software is technical in nature and a lot of the training we do perforce is developer-centric. So if I want to train around our code, syntax highlighting in the the slides would be massively helpful and I'd rather not set up the code in my IDE and then screenshot it. Text is better.

[Lilybiri · Accepted solution]

Your question was not detailed, that was why I asked for more details.

I doubt very much that this would ever be available, in all the years that I am on this forum daily, this is the first time that such a request appears. You can always lo a feature request. I would indeed suggest to set up in a tool and take a screenshot, maybe convert ot SVG instead of a bitmap image to improve clarity. Object styles are not very useful, because they only exist on text container level.

[clinti68368292]

Thanks Lilybiri​, yes that's why I clarified. Sorry for the confusion. Honestly kind of surprised that this has never come up. It would seem to indicate that captivate is (almost?) never used for any sort of technical training.

[Lilybiri]

Probably, I have used it for a lot of software training, but not for coding.

[BDuckWorks]

Captivate allows for the capture of customized content, through its recording functionality, I understand that it's not the best approach for your audience but you can record your interactions with your coding tools and playback the segments via a link from a Captivate file.

Another option I have used, when building training for a mainframe based 3270 application, was to capture the screens as text, format them in MS Word via styles, and then transfer the stylized text. 

This was done well before captivate, but you could explore a workflow where the materials were broken up, stored into a Content Management System (CMS) and called as a webpage via a URL in Cp.

[clinti68368292]

Thanks BDuckWorks​ I'll be investigating both.

Appreciate everyone's help!

[BDuckWorks]

If you're talking about a tool for JavaScript, the code window isn't designed as an editor. Feel free to edit in you choice of tools and copy then paste to the JS window in Cp.

If you mean for Advanced Actions, maybe a feature request?

🙂

[RodWard]

It is one of my sincerest hopes that some future version of Captivate will decide to integrate the IDE from one of their other excellent tools (e.g. Dreamweaver or Animate) so that Captivate could become a much better tool for writing the kind of JS code that we now see more and more Captivate users wanting to create.  The current JS window is really nowhere in the hunt.

[Lilybiri]

I am using Brackets if the JS code is more complicated. Anyway for that type of JS it is mostly recommended not to put the code in that tiny script window in CP, but the JS-file.