Quality of publish projects

[ericaverza]

Hello!

I have a problem that never happened before with me regarding captivate. I start a project from a power point presentation and added some interactive processes. However, when I publish it, the quality of image is not good. It is blurred and almost painful to read the text. I have already selected high quality in publish settings, but this didn't seem to change the final quality.

Does anybody has an idea of what can I do? This is a very important project to me, and I am afraid for this bad quality.

Thanks in advance!

[RodWard]

Can you please show screenshots of the issue you are seeing?

Was the size of the PPT stage at all similar to the size of the Captivate stage area?  What I am asking is, are you scaling the size of the project up or down?  That can often degrade the crispness of images and text.

Either way, if you spend much time on this forum you will hear many people say that using PowerPoint to start any project in Captivate is not a good idea.

[ericaverza]

Hi, I have an extensive project, in which I need to add interactive buttons. If I start directly from Captivate it will take really long to do it, since I also do not know how to edit everything as in power point. I am not sure about the size. In pptx, I see that it is 220 ppi. In captivate, the size is 1280 x 720. Below you can see the quality of the image. In this case it is even ok, but there are some parts where you almost can't read it at all. But even if it was only like the images below, I would be already unsatisfied, since it does not look professional.

Do you know what can I do?

[RodWard]

220 ppi in the PPT file means 220 pixels per inch.  So you would need to multiply the size of your PPT screen in inches by 220 to get the total size in pixels.  But this is not all that helpful.

PowerPoint typically uses these types of print-based measurements when what you really need to know is exactly how big the final screen size will be in pixels.  That's what Captivate is telling you when it says that the stage area is 1280 pixels wide by 720 pixels high.

But that's not all.  You need to remember that most computer screens are NOT running a resolution as high as 220 pixels per inch but are usually 96 dpi (or even something like 72 dpi).

So this is why your PPT project IS being rescaled when it is brought in to Captivate and that is causing the degradation of the images and text.  PowerPoint still hasn't migrated completely over to the increasingly digital world we work with in e-learning.  This is why it's always going to cause issues when you start your Captivate projects in PowerPoint.

I suggest you go back, do some math, and then change your PowerPoint project settings so that the final size will match better with the final required size of your Captivate project.  It would require adjusting a lot of the objects on the PPT stage before you would be able to bring it into Captivate again.  But by the time you did all of that, you probably could have build the same slides from scratch in Captivate and avoided all this hassle.

[RodWard]

Here's a YouTube video that shows how to set the PPT screen size in Pixels:

How to Change PowerPoint Slide Size in Pixels (or cm) - YouTube

But you will note that it still changes the values right back to Centimeters or Inches even when you specify it in pixels.  That's just PPT.

[Lilybiri]

Het mag wel eens in het Nederlands, deze fora hebben toch een vertaalfunctie.

Ik sluit me volledig aan bij Rod's standpunt. De slechtste manier om een eLearning cursus te make is te  starten met een PPT.  Ik gbruik geen schroevendraaier om een gaatje to boren, maar een boormachine.

PP¨T slides importeren in Captivate is alle mogelijke interactiviteit iperken, want elke PPT slide wordt omgezet in ee movie slide, waar je geen controle meer hebt over de individuele objecten.  Het omzetten van de reolsutie is al een zware opdracht. Powerpoint is toch bedoeld om the presenteren met? Waarom worden de afmeting niet gedefineerd in pixels? Captivate stelt je normaal een resolutie voor die overeenstemt met wat die 'print' eenheden in PPT zouden moeten zijn in pixels. Als je dat voorstel niet aanvaardt zit je al met een eerste mogelijke oorzaak van wazige tekst. 

Ik gebruik NOOIT PPT als start voor ee Captivate bestand, daarentegen gebruik ik wel Captivate om presentaties te maken. Je kan de ppt unzippen (hernoem de extensie naar zip) en de nodige assets recuperenen. Importeer die naar de bibiliotheek van een neiwu Captivate bestand en je kan aan de slag in Captivate, met alle mogelijke controle.

[ericaverza]

Hi Lilybiri,

I am doing a project in Dutch, but I do not speak Dutch (it is a long story). Could you explain me better how can I save the .ppt as zip? And how this can be imported as a captivate project? The file that I am working with is really big, and it would save me a lot of time if I could import some info directly.

[Lilybiri]

Sorry about that, always so happy when I can write in my mother tongue.

Replace the extension 'pptx' by 'zip', maybe for security reasons on a duplicate of the original.

Each PPT file (and Captivate file as well) is a zipped folder storing all the assets, like graphics, audio etc.

You cannot import directly to CP, unless you use the normal import which leads IMO to a bad start. However when you have unzipped the folder, you can find all the assets. Import them in the Library of a new project file in Captivate, with the wanted resolution. Start creating the Captivate slides, where you ca use the PPT example as guide. At least now you have full control over any object added, contrary to the imported slides where every PPT slide is converted to sort of a movie slide, trying to reproduce the animations set up in PPT.

If you want to keep with importing PPT slide, you need to accept the resolution that Captivate proposes, not change it at all. I treid to explain a very weird behavior of MS in PPT by defining the size in print units instead of px (which would be normal for an application meant to be used only on screens or with beamers, you will not use CMYK in that case neither).  I logged this 20 years ago to MS (as I did with many bugs in their apps) without any follow-up. One of the reasons I prefer Adobe a lot.

Changing the slide quality will not help, since everything in an imported PPT slide is 'frozen'. You don't have individual text objects, nor can you style text.

[ericaverza]

Hi Lilybiri,

I ended up doing all over again. When I think my problems are over, I am surprised again. As I said, I did my entire project again in Captivate. The problem is that, now, when I open the program, some of the images simply disappear from the project when I visualize it or publish it (even though I can still see the images on the edit screen from Captivate).

Do you know what may be causing this problem? The images were inserted and not pasted.

[RodWard]

Have you checked the timeline to see how long those images are set to remain on the timeline?  (Whatever you do, don't get Lilybiri started about how newbie users need to understand the timeline before doing anything complicated in Captivate.  It's her pet peeve.)

In short, Captivate isn't like PowerPoint.  With PPT you just dump stuff on the screen and it will stay there UNLESS you set up special timing.  With Captivate it's the opposite.  After you insert an image or other type of object on the screen THEN you have to move the beginning and end of its timeline object around to change where it appears or disappears from the timeline.

The Edit screen in Captivate normally shows all objects on the slide at the same time.  But you need to run the timeline in order to see when those images will enter and exit view.

[ericaverza]

Hi RodWard,

I am commenting in this old discussion because I still have a problem with resolution. I followed your instructions and I did the entire project again in captivate. Even writing the project with text caption, the quality of the text (when published) is bad and looks blurred. Some parts more than the others. I do not know exactly what I am doing wrong. I am using the text caption with a transparent background and font Arial.

Do you have any suggestion?

[RodWard]

Please show screenshots of the issue.

[ericaverza]

In the image below, the left side is the .pdf file and the right one is the index.html. The pdf is slightly better than the html, but still has some blur. The project has the size of 1280 x 720 and the font is Arial.

[RodWard]

How are you displaying this text in Captivate?  Did you take a screenshot of the PDF and then insert it as a graphic?  Are you displaying the PDF as a web object?

[ericaverza]

I did not understand your question. This text was created in Captivate as a text caption with a transparent background and Arial as a font. The images above are the screenshot of the .pdf  and .html files generated after publishing the Captivate project.

[ericaverza]

Most of the previous posts on this subjects are a bit old and advice to remove the selection of Anti-Alias Transparent Caption, which is no longer available in the most recent versions of captivate. Others say to add a bullet in the text caption some lines below. However, some of my text (as you can see in the figure above) already has bullet points and the quality continues to be bad. Other also say to apply a white highlight in every text caption. This will take a long time, as I have too many text captions. I also tried in some and it did not seem to improve the quality of the published project.

I kind checked all the discussion topics about it, but could not find a proper solution.

OBS1: I already selected my preferences > size and quality > the highest and also the quality of each slide as high (24-bit).

OBS2: The program itself, on my computer, seems fuzzy. It is definitely not crystal clear as my other programs. I do not know if this influences, but I thought it was better to say.

[RodWard]

OK.  I see now that you were talking about the output from Captivate, as either PDF or HTML

If you want the text to appear more crisp in output there are only a couple of options available.  One is to build ONLY as Responsive, and the other is to make all of the text associated with variables so that it becomes Dynamic Text.  Neither option is necessarily easy, and since you are a newbie developer, I would not recommend you go either route,

[Lilybiri]

Rod, I already explained about dynamic text in her other thread, tried to explain how to insert an empty variable. 

Why do 'developers' never take training? It doesn't make sense, what a waste of working hours.

[ericaverza]

HI RodWard, I tried to add the empty variable v_null as recommended by Lilybiri. I created the variable v_null in Users without any value, and I added it in the end of every text caption. The text is now crispy and nice, but it lost formatting and some parts of the text simply disappeared. I posted this issue in this other discussion:

How to keep text 'selectable' in projects published as HTML5 and PDF?

However, I also noticed that the quality of my images when published either in SWF or HTML5 is very bad if compared to that I see when I am editing the project. In the image below, you can see the image during the editing in captivate (left) and after published in a .pdf file (right).

I searched on the forum, but I could not find a solution for that. Do you know what can I do?

[RodWard]

Images published to SWF or PDF (which is also really an SWF embedded in the PDF) get turned into JPG format, which is always going to be a little blurry.

Try publishing ONLY to HTML5 and set the slide quality on each slide to High Quality 24 bit to see if that gives better results.

[ericaverza]

Hi RodWard, I did what you said, but the quality of the image continues extremely poor.

I really do not know what else I can do to improve the quality of the published project. Either in SWF or HTML it looks very blurred and almost painful to read. My preferences are set as follows, and my resolution is 1280 x 720.

[RodWard]

Did you resize these images at all?  Or did you keep them at exactly 100% of their actual size?

[ericaverza]

This is the exact thing I am doing now. I just made a test: in the first two slides of my presentation, I changed the font from Arial to Calibri Regular, and I deleted all the images and inserted new ones without resizing them in Captivate. I was full of hope, since I saw in older posts that this could be an issue. But no, nothing changed. The quality is still extremely bad.

[RodWard]

I think you are overblowing this issue of text quality.  Images and text in a browser environment will usually suffer some degradation.

Below is a screenshot from the HTML5 output of one of my own courses.

If the quality of this text is unacceptable to you, then I cannot help you further.  This is just what we have to work with.

But on balance, I have never had one of my clients complain about the quality of the text at this level.

If you are a perfectionist and you were hoping for 'print quality' crispness in the online world, then you are bound to be disappointed.

[AdobeCommunityUser]

Hi Rodward,

Thank you for your replies on this issue. They have helped but do not address a fundamental issue that quality of output from Adobe Captivate is complex and remains below par even after those technical difficulties have been surmounted.

I am also having similar issues regarding poor quality after publishing in Adobe Captivate and have followed your kind advice rigorously.

Please let me mention from the outset that I am certainly not a perfectionist. I do not wish to digress in any way but your criticsm of the previous user in this way really is not helpful. The issue is the limitation of Adobe Captivate in that it cannot produce quality output.  The user has reasonable expectations that Adobe Captivate should be able to publish in a reasonable and non-blurry way and it does not. The blurriness may once have been acceptable but is not any longer.

I am genuinely disappointed that having purchased Adobe Captivate that the quality of output is this poor and this is after spending days trying to fix a variety of Adobe Catpivate issues and also to try and improve the publishing quality.

I need to find an alternative.

Regards