With the release of Adobe Captivate 2, there are fewer and fewer reasons to export your Adobe Captivate project to Macromedia Flash. However, there may be times when you need to add complex simulations or components that require exporting your project to Flash.

This article leads you through the process of exporting projects from Adobe Captivate into Flash 8. (These instructions also apply to Flash MX 2004.) I also discuss some of the nuances of moving content from the managed environment of Adobe Captivate, where all the technical details are taken care of for you, to the unmanaged environment of Flash, where you take care of all the technical details yourself.

Requirements

You must install the following software to follow the steps in this tutorial:

Adobe Captivate 2

• Try
• Buy

Flash 8 (or Flash MX 2004)

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge

You should have a good understanding of the Flash development environment and a good working knowledge of ActionScript 2.0.

What is the Flash Export option?

You might be wondering when to use the Flash Export option. Frankly, with every new release of Adobe Captivate, there are fewer and fewer reasons to use this option. Almost everything you need to create—training, interactive demos, self-running marketing movies, and so forth—you can do in the Adobe Captivate development environment.

However, there are times when you may need to tweak or extend the core functionality of Adobe Captivate. This is when the Flash Export option becomes an invaluable development tool.

I must emphasize that you should use this option only when you have exhausted all attempts at accomplishing your desired result in the Adobe Captivate development environment. This is because once you import your project to Flash, you can no longer maintain it in Adobe Captivate.

When you install Adobe Captivate on your computer, it looks for Flash MX 2004 or Flash 8. If Adobe Captivate finds either or both packages, it places a DLL file named RDMFISTUB.DLL in the Importers folder within the local configuration for each Flash installation detected:

C:\Documents and Settings\<UserID>\Local Settings\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\Configuration\Importers

Note: For Mac OS, this path name is as follows:

[Mac HD]/Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Flash 8/en/Configuration/Importers

This DLL is the engine that translates everything contained in an Adobe Captivate file into the Flash development environment format.

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