Is there a way for the end user to copy and paste from a Captivate project?

[megancAO]

More specifically, if someone were taking a course through captivate, how can I make the text in the project copy & paste-able? Currently, the only things that can be clicked on in the project are a couple of buttons - there is no way to interact with the text itself.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

There are several methods of displaying text that learners can select and copy. For example, you can display a text entry box with some Default Text. Users will even be able to edit the text or simply select it and copy it. Another method is to create an HTML document, zip it up and drag it to the slide from your desktop. Captivate will convert it to a web object. Learners will be able to select and copy this text but not edit it. Web objects and, for that matter, text entry boxes can be made to provide learners with scrolling text as well. This can be useful if you want to provide your learners with lots of information.

[Lilybiri]

If you told more about the goal of this question, it would be easier to offer suggestions.

There are two Learning interactions which can be used besides the Text Entry Boxes:

• Notes: allows the learner to take notes throughout the project
• Scrolling Text Interaction which may be a more flexible alternative to Text Entry Boxes. It allows to enter and edit text as well and can be linked to a user variable (but is not interactive which means it cannot have a score automatically.

Your sentence '...the only things that can be clicked on in the project are a couple of buttons ' is not true. What about Drag&Drop? It can also be used for text manipulation.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

I agree with Lieve that telling us how you would like to do something is less useful than telling us what you want to accomplish. Sometimes if we understand the objective there might be a better way.

One word of caution with the scrolling text and notes interactions, they are both based on SWF widgets. While they will publish out to HTML5 today, we know there is no future for SWF at this point. I would suspect that these widgets will be deprecated upon future releases of Adobe Captivate.

[megancAO]

I appreciate both of your replies, thank you! And to provide a bit of clarification, I am creating an instructional course, the contents of which include some code snippets - I was told from someone who had taken it that it would be useful to be able to just copy the code snippets from the course and paste it into their relevant programs.

[Lilybiri]

Hmmm... in that case I would even prefer to add a document (pdf) to the course which includes the code snippets. They should be unformatted by preference. The Notes interaction allows also to print all the notes if the students wish to do so.

The interactions play in a HTML wrapper, and Adobe is not the only company to use that approach. Pure SWF is dead, but AIR applications are also still very much alive, and they have been created with Flash technology.