Captivate 2017 Close Captions not allowing text edits, not saving changes.

[moyco]

We are experiencing a major problem working with closed captions in Captivate 2017 (10.0.1.285). When I copy chunks of text into cue points, and try to edit the amount of text in each, it won't stay after saving. In some cases, when I try to edit text or delete it, the "Save" button is not active. I have about 150-200 slides across 50 projects that have quite a bit of audio and it's slowing the process down to a crawl.

There's no rhyme or reason for this issue and it happens no matter how many cue points I have. Sometimes everything works fine for a few screens and then it doesn't. Yesterday I didn't have the problem until I started captioning my third project.

Does anyone have any solutions for this? This is happening on both Mac and Windows versions.

[RodWard]

Is it possible that Captivate is rejecting these edits because you are trying to copy in text that has formatting?  When you copy the text, do you first make sure it is plain text without any formatting?  Paste it into a plain text editor such as Notepad first to strip out any residual formatting and then copy from there. Never copy text straight from MS Word or PPT.

If that's NOT the issue, is it possible you may be trying to copy in too much text at a time for the Closed Caption lines.  Try just copying in one sentence at a time to see if the issue is related to the amount of text.

[moyco]

This is the first I've ever heard about not copying text directly from Word. I've been doing it this way for several years, and since Captivate v7 with no problems.

I rarely copy more than two or 3 sentences at a time, and then move the text as I add cue points. However, with Captivate 2017 now there's an issue. It doesn't even matter if I copy a couple of words and then try to move one to a new cue point, that's when I can either no longer save (button is grayed out) or, if I can save it doesn't stick.

I certainly hope there's a different solution here, because this version is the most buggy I've ever seen and I've been using it since v4.

[Lilybiri]

CC now has a lot more formatting options. It is well known that it is not a good practice to copy/paste formatted text from another application.  You would have to strip out the (sometimes bad) formatting styles in Word. That you didn't have that issue with previous CP versions could be due to the fact that CC didn't have any advanced styling options in those versions?

[moyco]

It may be well known to you, but not necessarily everyone    There’s not much formatting in the text, other than bold or italic sometimes. However, I’ll try s Rod’s suggestion of converting to plain text for a few screens.

This will be a huge time suck if that turns out to be the problem. We use scripts with 4 columns (screen no., screen text, audio, media) to build our training and we can’t wait until the end to add captions. There will audio edits and some screens need full RE-records so the scriots have to stay as is. If we have to extract plain text each and every time we have to edit the captions it will add days to our production, so I’m in for even more nights and weekends than already planned. This is a huge disappointment. We may have to look into other software options.

[Lilybiri]

Strange.... it is all over this forum. Word is known to have a lot embedded (and not well done) styling codes, where you don't have any control. What Rod and myself told about using unformatted text is not only valid for Captivate but for many other applications. 

Hope you'll find another eLearning authoring tool with the nice CC feature of Captivate.

[moyco]

There’s really no need to be snide. Not everyone lives on the forums, and I only visit when I have a problem I can’t resolve, which is rarely. In fact, most of my problems turn out to be bugs or I’m attempting to do something that cannot be done in the software. We don’t require any formatting in our CC, so so we’ll likely go to html if we decide to change. Have a nice day!

[stevenh85583448 · Accepted solution]

I have run into similar issues using Word text pasting into CC in Captivate. Not only CC but other text pastes too.

After a lot of trial and error; and not knowing of the Word to Captivate issues first heard today since V1, I started a practice of using only common fonts and formatting. Arial 10 and 12 seem to have the least problems for me when pasting from Word to Captivate and that is what I use in Word storyboards now as a standard. No rhyme or reason; just seems to have less issues.

Hope you find your solution and perhaps this will help.

Please let us know how you resolve for our own growth and understanding.

[moyco]

Thanks for this suggestion. I tried it both ways; plain text and changing the font to Arial (it was Calibri). Both ways were better than using the Calibri, but again they both had problems when I tried to move text from one cue point to another. It took multiple tries to have the change stick, and I had to close out of the captions window and go back in order to get the Save button active.

I think the problem I'm having it a Captivate issue, not a font or style problem. As I said in one of my replies, it doesn't matter how much or little text I'm copying from one cue point to the other. What happens is the original cue point won't seem to let go of the extra text without several saves or tries.

After trying this several times on several screens, I'm going to go with the Arial text for now. It seems to have fewer problems than even the plain text. In addition, changing the font in my storyboard allows us to continue our workflow and will cause fewer problems. The plain text option won't work for us because it's crucial for us to see the breaks so we can time our animations.

[RodWard]

I have never personally experienced the issue you are facing, however there may be something different about your setup or environment or project that is causing this issue.

Feel free to log a bug report about it with Adobe.  You may have stumbled across something that only occurs when you are using cue points the way you mention.  On my projects I tend to not use a single audio file spread across numerous slides but have a separate audio clip on each slide. 

[moyco]

After reading your reply, I see I wasn't completely clear about the problem. I am only using one audio file per slide, but have several cue points per audio file.

If there are too many words for a cue point (we only use a single line and try to keep it short), then I have to move some words to the next cue point. When I do that, the words tend to stay in the original cue point even after I've moved them and saved. When that happens, it takes several tries to delete the unneeded text and I am unable to save because the Save button isn't active for some reason.

By the way, this has happened when I type the text directly in Captivate caption cue point, so I believe it may be a bug. I will log it today.