Text captions containing variables don't display fully

Report · Aug 19, 2015

Hello, I'm doing this course where I place user inserted text variables in text captions and the problem is the resulting text captions display differently and are not shown fully.

Let me show you:

1. Here's first screenshot from Captivate 7 (sorry, it's in Russian, but I'll explain what the problem is):

I marked the variable with yellow color and the red circle shows the point after which text is not displaying in output. Also as you can see the caption size frame has plenty of additional space.

2.The second screenshot shows the resulting slide after I publish the course:

Here the variable marked yellow is replaced with text, which was entered by user on the previous slide as it should be. But a large portion of text after red circle isn't visible.

I mentioned the style of caption being slightly different and figured it has something to do with variable maybe, but I tried reinserting it from Format menu and changing Maximum length values, but that didn't help. Increasing the text caption frame size also doesn't seem to change anything. It always cuts at the exact same point, almost like the overall text caption length is limited somewhere, but I can't find where.

Hope you can help with this issue.

Report · Aug 19, 2015

Hi there

When you insert the variable, note that you also choose the number of characters to be presented. I believe the default for version 7 was 15. The new default for version 8 is 50 so you don't encounter that often.

Unfortunately this isn't a situation where you can just double-click the variable in the caption and change it. You will need to delete the variable, then insert it again, but ensure you configure the character count to a larger value.

Cheers... Rick

Report · Aug 19, 2015

Hey, Rick, thanks for the response, but changing variable limit doesn't seem to have any impact on the overall text caption length.

I experimented with the option and tried both:

Intentionally decreasing the length limit of variable to 3, which made the variable text display only first 3 letters of whatever user typed in earlier
Increasing the limit dramatically to 100 which made the user input text display fully since it's long enough for any city name.

The text caption length, where the variable is placed however remained the same in both cases, being cut at the exact same point as I mentioned in previous post.

Report · Aug 20, 2015

‌how did you test? After publishing? Was this SWF or HTML output?

Report · Sep 25, 2015

I am struggling with the same thing in Captivate 8. I have tried testing it both SWF and HTML, with the same result. Text doesn't display after the variable (but not consistently). It seems to be more problematic the larger the text caption box. For small text caption boxes, it seems to work. I have tried changing the length of the variables too, 20, 50, and 100. No success yet.