How to make scalable text button

[blackbasenji]

I'm learning Captivate at the moment and I cannot understand this at all...

I want to creat a text button. Captivate allows NO options to change the grey text box or blue rollover effect. So I find out that the only way to do it is to creat your own image button, BUT Captivate does not allow Illustrator import, thus the images are not scalable. This means that if I want to creat a text button that will have various sizes of widths the image will have to be stretched and this looks awful.

Someone please tell me that my only option is to not create a seperate image for every instance of text due to variance in width.......

Please help.

I tried calling the Adobe Technical Support line... I even spoke with a specialist. They did not speak English well and kept telling me over and over to import my own image... but that does not solve the problem, it still stretches!!! They basically said there is no way around this. I cannot believe this to be the case... Even powerpoint allows text button customization....

Thank you

[Lilybiri]

The text buttons take over the aspect of the OS- buttons. If you want buttons with another look, you can indeed use image buttons. Captivate is all about bitmap, but you can import Illustrator images as smart objects into Photoshop and import them that way. But what do you mean by 'not scalable'?  Do you create the image buttons in their 3 states (up, down, over)? Or do you just want an image as a button?

Lilybiri

BTW there is also the possibility to have a transparent button and put that on top of an image. Or you can use the button widget?

[blackbasenji]

This is what I'm trying to do. I have some slides with about 10 buttons that require text in them. The width of each box is different. I want to create a button for the text that has rounded corners. The problem with this is that because the buttons must adjust to the width of the copy, whatever button image I creat will be stretched and look bad. This is what I mean by scalable. I would want at least some functionality that allows me to edit text buttons or at least allow me to import vector art so that I can adjust the width without it stretching.

Does this make sense? It seemed like such a basic thing... I guess I'm just confused that Powerpoint has the ability to edit text buttons properly but Captivate doesn't (if that's really the case).

[RodWard]

The look and feel of the default text button object in Captivate is actually controlled by your operating system.  So if you look at the same course onh a Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 7 box, the buttons will all look slightly different.   This is one reason that Captivate gives you the option to use other button types such as image buttons, which you can also create for yourself if you are handy with an image editor.  There is currently no import facility for vector art from Illustrator or other similar programs.

Since the OS controls the default text button appearance, you don't have a lot of control over things like the corner radius etc, because in the OS, this might actually be square (e.g. in Win2000).

It sounds more to me like what you REALLY want is to be able to use some of the Captivate text caption types as if they were buttons.  Some of these have rounded corners.  Alternatively, you can create a rounded rectangle using the drawing tool and configure the corner radius and background colour any number of ways.  The only things you'd be missing are rollover effects (doable with rollover captions) and interactivity.  Lilybiri suggested that you can just place an invisible clickbox over the top of the caption to make it work like a button.  The user will never know that it's the clickbox instead of the caption that they're clicking.

If you want even more options as far as interactivity triggered by other mouse events such as mouse over and mouse out, you can make almost any Captivate screen object interactive using the Event Handler widget from Infosemantics. 

Free trial versions are available for download if you feel like playing.