Captivate 8 - Internal Error/Publish Fail

[BBryant]

When I go to publish, it will be at the "Optimizing Content", and then an "Error(s) Internal Error" box will pop up. I click OK and a Publish failed box pops up. I've uninstalled and reinstalled a couple times (deleted preferences), but I can't publish the file.

Any thoughts on what can I do to fix this?

[RodWard]

Try turning off Advanced Project Compression in Preferences.

[BBryant]

Just tried that, and still created an Internal Error/Publish Fail.

[windscorpion]

I get that occaisionally, i find restarting CP8 solves it though.

[menkeman]

Hi BBryant, did you ever find a solution for this error message?  I'm having the same problem in Captivate 8.  I tried turning off the Advanced Project Compression and restarting.  Nothing worked so far.

Thanks!

[RodWard]

There may be some component or object on one of your slides that is fouling up the publishing process.

Try hiding groups of slides to use a process of elimination to find the culprit.

If that doesn't work, try removing all variables and advanced actions.

Do all of this experimenting on a COPY of your project file of course, not the original.

[menkeman]

Hi Rod,

Thanks for the feedback.  Is there a simple way to do this?  I have interactions and only video and audio's in my course.  I also have a questionnaire at the end but nothing too involved.  I tried hiding the questions but to no avail.  I have 121 slides total.  Also, is there a way to get help from Adobe on these matters?  Or do you contract out your services?

Thank you!

[LineP]

Hi BB

I'm from Denmark, and here we use the letters æøå and ÆØÅ. I've experienced that media that contains these letters (and empty spaces) provoke "Internal Error". So maybe you should check your source files (videos and images) and see if these could be the reason.

/Jacob

[RodWard]

There is no simpler way to do this debugging that I am aware of.

Hiding groups of slides only takes a few minutes.  I usually hide one half of the entire project then publish to see if the issue is gone.  If it is, I know the issue is somewhere in that half, if not, I test hiding the other half. and then publish again.  Once you verify that hiding some portion of the project fixes the issue, it's usually only a matter of minutes before you get down to the slide where that issue is located.  It's rarely more than one slide involved.

If hiding either half does nothing, then I move on to testing removal of variables and Advanced Actions.  But to be honest, that doesn't prove necessary very often.

[menkeman]

Thank you Jacob and Rod!

I think I know what happened and can't recover from it.  I ran a disk clean-up file last week and I think the compressed file was deleted.  When I go to save the file, it's looking for the file and suggests recreating a zip file.  How can I build a new course file by copying over one slide at a time or is there another way to rebuild the course?

Also, given I'm a newbie to Captivate, what set-up should I consider when building a course with quiz features?

Thanks!

All the Best,

Robert

[RodWard]

Captivate allows you to have multiple CPTX project files open at the same time in different tabs.  So you can just copy one or more slides from one project and paste them into another, provided they are of the same size.  (There will be some other complications such as duplication of styles and renaming of objects, but that's probably going to be the price you pay to save your project from extinction.)

The only other way to 'rebuild the project' is to start from scratch again.

[michael@hrl]

Hi Rod,

I got the same "publish fail" message using Captivate 8 on a small project. I'm pleased to say that your strategy worked. Slide 42 of 48  looked like a normal question slide but was in fact an insidious corrupter and vile "publish fail" conspirator. I soon put an end to its reign of horror. Thanks to your stewardship I have been able to throw away my Valium and only mutter to myself very rarely now. I'm hope the eye twitching will vanish when I upgrade to Captivate 9.

[Keith_S-AZ]

I realize this post is several years old now, but I've just encountered the same issue in Captivate 8. I've narrowed it down to 3 quiz slides and they all contain hot spots. Two of them are in separate question pools. I don't know that the hot spots are the problem, but it seems likely since that's common element in all 3 slides.

UPDATE: I pulled the 2 slides out of their respective question pools and back into the main project. After hiding all 3 hot spot slides, I was able to publish successfully, so now I know that these slides are the culprits.

More testing is needed to figure out what the root cause is.