Table of content/background/masterslide blues

[Guest]

I'm trying to set up a table of contents on the left that stays open. I don't want the background to be blocked by the menu. I've set the menu to "separate." When I do that, my backgrounds that are the same width as my project are pushed to the right. If I make the background the usable space to the right of my menu, the background centers, leaving white on either side. If I make the background the width of the project with white on the left, the white shows beside the "Separate" menu.

"Overlay" allows my image to exactly where I want, but, the menu is part of my instructional strategy,so I want it open all the time. I've wasted far too much time on this. If someone can help, I'd really appreciate it.

I really sems like this is a bug, but I wonder if I am just not using the program correctly.

[Guest]

I should note that I'm using the Captivate 5 trial. I really hope this doesn't occur in the real product.

I can't use my Captivate 4 version because Adobe didn't see any reason to make Cap 4 compatible with Win 7 (the two don't get along at all). Their "work-around" is to have users upgrade to Cap 5. I've advocated for the upgrade, and it looks like the powers are going to approve that.

[RodWard]

Whoever told you Cp4 won't run on Win 7 is very mistaken.

Captivate 4 is indeed compatible with Windows 7, and even works (as a 32 bit app) under Win 7 64 bit.  I have both Cp4 and Cp5 working on Win 7 64 bit right now.

If you're having issues getting Cp4 to work on Win 7 there are plenty of posts that talk about how to resolve such issues.  It usually comes down to having the latest drivers for all hardware and running the app as Administrator.

Don't let this stop you from upgrading to Cp5 though.  It's well worth the money.

[Guest]

Thanks Rod. I'm very high on Cap5 (although I'm having TOC troubles with that). I was just responding to someone on Linkedin who disagreed with my assertion that Cap4 and Win7 didn't get along. Adobe support is the one who told be that my problem was Win 7. They said 32 bit was better than 64. The thing to remember is that I'm working for a large corporation that has lots of custom stuff on their system, including security stuff. I'm afraid it way past my competence to sort this out.

Check out my post on the TOC/background issue. I'm hoping it is fixed in the real version (I'm using the trial version until the expense is approved).

thomas

[RodWard]

It sounds to me like what you need is just to set the TOC to Separate and Left (if you want it to appear on the left side of your content).  All you need to do usually is ensure your users have enough room to display the total width in a browser given their available screen real estate.

When I publish this way in Cp5 the total width of my content is the width of my TOC (usually 300 pixels or so but you can set it to anything you want in Cp5) plus the width of my Captivate stage.

So if your TOC is set to 300px and your movie is 800 wide x 600 high, then your total required window width in the browser at runtime will be 300 + 800 or 1100 pixels.  The height will be 600 + 20-30 pixels for the playback bar if you're using one.  Now if your users are only on monitors running 1024 x 768, the height will be OK for them but the width would be too large.  For the setup described here they'd need to be running more like 1200 x 768 or more to see everything.

I find with Captivate content playing in a browser, the best strategy is to use a Javascript link to open the playing window to the precise size you need to display everything.  Use the Javascript window.open() method parameters to turn off all scrollbars and toolbars that you can.  This is your best route to ensuring that all users see more or less the same window.  If serving up the content from an LMS, most will have options to launch the SCO in a separate window.

I normally have the TOC set to Hide, but here's what I see when I set it to Overlay. Are you saying you cannot get anything to look like this?

[Lilybiri]

Hi Rod,

Think you set the TOC in the screenshot to Separate, not to Overlay (typo 🙂 ?)

The minimum width needed for the TOC is 250pixels, but you can increment it as told by Rod.

Lilybiri