Text in captions and buttons disappearing, state changes

[michelewrites]

I found a similar question that related to Captivate 6, but I am using Captivate 9, and want to see if there is any new insight into this annoying problem. Every time I open one of the three projects I am currently working on, the text captions don't show in the filmstrip, on the editing screen, in preview, or upon publishing. Click on each text caption, or even just preview a slide and go back, and they will reappear. But I don't want to have to do that everytime I want to make an edit.

I tried the solution in the other thread about clearning the cache, but that did not make a difference (I tried opening two different files.)

Not sure if it's related, but also sometimes the states of objects are not staying put. A simple right-click to reset them works, but again, I don't want to have to do this on every single button and checkbox.

Thanks for any insight.

[RodWard]

Have you by any chance recently updated to Captivate 9.0.2

[michelewrites]

Yes, it looks like I have version 9.0.2.421

[Lilybiri]

When patching did you Clear Preferences and delete the Layouts folder in the Public documents. It is in the release notes, but few users read them.

[michelewrites]

I just tried that and opened one of the affected projects, and it still came in with all of the text captions "missing".

And can I just say, what a pain to have to do that when updating...

I did just reinstall windows on this machine about a week ago and reinstalled Captivate after that. I honestly don't know if this was happening before that, but I kind of think it was. I was just dealing with it (the captions reappear once you click on them) until I had a few minutes to finally see if I could research a way to fix that problem.

[RodWard]

I noticed a blog post from the E-learning Brothers website this week that spoke about this issue being connected with their templates.  Are you perhaps using one of their template interactions in your project?

[Lilybiri]

Doing that will not have effect on existing projects, since you already used a Layout which will not be automatically updated. Did you try out a new project?

The bug with the eLearning Brothers templates is for buttons on Quiz slides. Contrary to the default themes coming with Captivate, where the Quiz Button style is always a Transparent Button type, the eLearning Brothers use Text Buttons mostly (those are taking over style of the OS), and that was causing the issues. I didn't see that this could also have effect on text captions, nor on other buttons. Which type of buttons are you using? It is easy to check: choose another type as default style.

[michelewrites]

I created my own template, and the buttons missing text upon opening the project for editing are text buttons.

So it sounds like the bug might be related to using a custom template instead of one of Captivate's default themes. In which case, I'm hoping to find a solution that fixes both new projects (haven't tried that yet) and existing projects.

I plan to post some of the custom solutions I used in this template sometime soon.

[Lilybiri]

It could be those text buttons. There is a solution posted here: Missing Captivate Quiz Buttons? We Can Fix It » eLearning Brothers

You could try if replacing the dll file works also for your custom templates? To check you could first try to replace one of the Text buttons by a Transparent button? I don't know if this could solve the text captions issue.

[michelewrites]

I looked up the blog post when I saw Rod's comment and tried that solution. I created a new project from my template and put some text in the text placeholders I had created on a few pages. I also copied the interaction that uses text buttons. I closed the project and reopened it, and everything is visible. So one of those two solutions worked for future projects.

But not the existing project. All of the text captions are "missing", even on pages where I only have image buttons, not text buttons. And I don't actually have any quiz objects anywhere in the project.

Do you have any suggestions for correcting the existing 3 projects? I am almost finished with them. I don't know if my client will ever want to update them, but I wouldn't want to leave those files like that for them. I also don't want to spend a lot of time on it.

[Lilybiri]

That is a very weird issue. Did you try changing the default style of the captions, maybe create a clone of the present style, and make it identical to the original one? I hope you didn't override the default caption style.