Display External Web Page in Captivate Slide?

[vauclain2]

Hi,

I'd really like to be able to have an external website appear within the captivate window.  Is there a way to insert a URL into a slide and have the web page content displayed?  I have been able to do this in articulate presenter, but can't figure out how to do this in captivate.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

vauclain2

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

As it stands with Captivate you will only be able to open a new window.

I believe it may be possible to achieve using a Widget. But you would have to hear from one of the folks that is familiar with coding widgets.

Tristan? Michael?

Cheers... Rick

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[Erik Lord]

As far as I know, there is no way to show a web page inside a SWF.

To show a web page, something has to render that web page. The most common approach is to have some sort of browser engine integrated to do that.

For instance, embedding the IE ActiveX control would embed the IE web browser engine and allow a webpage to be rendered. However, SWFs can't load ActiveX controls. However, this is a very common approach for, say, Visual Basic or Authorware-based projects to display HTML pages within the module.

As another example, Dreamweaver CS4 has a 'Live Preview' mode. I believe that's acheived by embedding the WebKit engine.

Now, with tools like Zinc (www.multidmedia.com) you can 'extend' Flash to allow for such ActiveX control embedding, among many other things, so that could be an approach...but you'd definitely need to know Flash programming to use it (to develop a widget, which CP might be able to use).

AIR is supposedly looking at, or can, handle internal webpage rendering last I read up on it.

BUT as it stands now, by itself, there's no way I know of to embed an actual HTML page, much less a live URL, into a standard SWF - including one generated by CP.

Erik

[vauclain2]

Erik,

Thanks so much for the response. I am not a flash programmer, so I guess I would need to find someone to build me a captivate plugin that leverages some sort of browser engine code.  In my case, it would not need to be able to parse more than the most simple HTML tags.  Just enough to display plain and bold text and carriage returns / line feeds.  I'm actually surprised that nobody has done this yet.  Articulate Presenter allows you to embed a live web page within its player window.  I know that Captivate and Articulate are not exactly targeting the same functionality, but I'm still surprised.  I did look at Adobe Presenter, thinking I could use my Captivate movie with an Acrobat Presenter module, but it does not support a "slide" that loads an external web page inside the player.

Let me know if anything else comes to mind.

Thanks,

Wain

[Erik Lord]

Oh, well, if it's just simple HTML formatting, you can do that with 'CDATA' tags in XML files...

But that may not be what you're looking for.

I didn't know Presenter could do this. I'd love to know how they acheived it. I could be wrong in my presumptions but there's no way I know of to get an 'html renderer' into a standard SWF.

Wish I had a better answer for you!
Erik

[www_cpguru_com]

I agree with Eric here. From what I know it is not possible to load a HTML page into Flash/Captivate. Sure as Eric states you can load external data from an XML or TXT file and then apply some HTML formatting to it, but you can't load an instance of www.google.com into a "window" in your Flash file. This is not allowed due to security restrictions.

I had no idea that Presenter could do this and I wonder how they are pulling that of. I have Presenter installed here on this machine so I will try and see how that works.

/Michael

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Visit my Captivate blog with tips & tricks, tutorials and Widgets.

[vauclain2]

Michael and Erik,

Thanks very much for your help.  I'm guessing the reason Articulate Presenter can do this is that a Published Articulate module doesn't consist of one SWF.  It looks like there are many other components.  I certainly don't have alot of expertise in this area though.

I don't currently have Presenter installed, but here is some information from there support site:

http://www.articulate.com/blog/web-objects/

Thanks again,

Wain

[vauclain2]

I found another, more detailed demo - much more information:

http://www.articulate.com/community/blogdemo/wo_demo/player.html

[Erik Lord]

This is fascinating. I didn't know Presenter could do this and am struck that I hadn't heard of this before. This is pretty great functionality and especially being delivered through a SWF. I'm assuming they've extended a custom SWF object with something like Zinc... I wish I had more time to explore this... Wish I could be of more help with the CP question but thanks for posting!

Erik

[www_cpguru_com]

Yes it's very interesting and I can't really figure out how they are actually acomplishing that.  A Google search for embedding HTML in Flash returns tons of pages stating that it can't be done. The only thing close I found is that it can be acomplished with Adobe Air, but to my knowledge you can't embed Air files into a SWF ;o)

/Michael

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Visit my Captivate blog with tips & tricks, tutorials and Widgets.

[Guest]

Yeah, the Web Object that is available for Articulate Presenter does look very cool. I really wish that we could have widget that would provide the same level of functionality.

Best - Mark

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[Jim_Leichliter]

I downloaded the Articulate 30 day free trial to see this web object in action... the one that will display a live web page in your project.  I put in a link to a Google Spreadsheet Form and was able to even post data to the spreadsheet... amazing... and has a lot of implications for eLearning.  I've officially requested this as a possible feature for Cp5.

How did they do it?  How the heck did they get a fully functional web browser inside of flash?  Acutally, they didn't.  They are using an iFrame layered on top of the flash file to make it "appear" as if the web content is loaded in your presentation.  When you don't need the iFrame, they hide it using div tags.  Very creative and I was able to pull this off in Cp4 using a little javasrcipt and html.  I'd love to make this a widget, but I think it would be too complicated for the average Cp user to set up.... still toying with the idea since it has a lot of implications... namely web forms/apps to collect data.  I also noticed Articulate has had this feature since 2004... I guess the Cp dev team doesn't think this is a "must have".  If you think it's worth it, please send in a feature request.

Jim Leichliter

[johndaigle]

Go Jim! Great idea.

John Daigle

Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor

[Erik Lord]

Thanks for the follow-up. Now that you uncovered how it's done, I bet we could figure out a CP4 approach too. Indeed, very clever and kudos to the Articulate team for figuring out that approach. However, I've a few other things I feel are much more important to CP5 (stability, authoring, etc) than this feature trick...especially since we can now probably do it anyway 😉

I do however encourage others to post such a request if they feel it important enough!

Erik

[vauclain2]

Erik,

Thanks, but it wasn't me who figured it out!  I appreciate all of the work you and your colleagues did to uncover what was going on.

Wain

[Jim_Leichliter]

I've created a free Adobe Captivate 5 widget to insert a web page into your presentations.

http://jimleichliter.blogspot.com/2010/11/adobe-captivate-5-web-page-widget.html

Enjoy,

Jim Leichliter

[vauclain2]

Jim,

Thanks so much!  This will come in very handy.

Thanks,

Wain

[Jim_Leichliter]

This widget now has a new home:

http://captivatedev.com/2010/11/05/adobe-captivate-5-web-page-widget/

[queenbe]

do you have a similar widget that works with cap 5.5 without me having to try and re-create with javascript & iframe?

[Jim_Leichliter]

The web page widget works with Captivate 5.0 or 5.5