As more and more training centers use Adobe Captivate, the need to create printed document versions of Adobe Captivate projects for learners, reviews, or working with clients has become more common.

Figure 1. Previous versions of Adobe Captivate provided users with a Print Handout option

Adobe Captivate 2 enhances the capability of the Publishing to Microsoft Word feature by providing three customizable templates outputting your Adobe Captivate content. Users simply select the appropriate template and Adobe Captivate creates the printed documents for the project, which you can then distribute. This article explains how to use the different output templates in Adobe Captivate 2.

 

Requirements

To make the most of this article, you need the following software:

Adobe Captivate 2

• Try
• Buy

Microsoft Word

• adobecaptivate_wordoutput_documentation.pdf (PDF, 32K)

Brief description of the three printed publishing options

Let us quickly walk through the different Templates that Adobe Captivate 2 provides. Your manager doesn’t have to have Adobe Captivate installed on his or her system to review your project. We recommend using Adobe Acrobat to turn the documents into PDF format with easy review and commenting functionality.

Lesson template

If you are training a small group of learners in a class room setting, you can provide handouts that even include quizzes and an answer key. Or simply provide the lesson content in PDF content (requires Adobe Acrobat) for later reference as part of the online course.

If you wish to track the quiz results for each learner, you should upload the scoredsimulations and assessments to a Learning Management System (LMS) or Acrobat Connect Enterprise Server.

Unlike screen shots in the Handout output, the Lesson template prints the content of each slide as learning material. The Question slides are printed in such a way that learners can use it for practice and compare their responses to an answer key.
While printing the Document, you can choose to generate an Answer key which would list all the answers in the order of the questions.

Figure 2. Quiz and answer key as part of lesson template output

The scenario: Publishing projects as lessons

You are training a small group of people. You have created an Adobe Captivate SWF file with lot of learning material and a short assessment at the end. After the training, you want the students to review the content and take a quiz. The students hand over their answers to you and you share the answer key with them.

With a large audience, the preferred way to implement this process is to upload the SWF file to any learning management system (LMS) and track the performance of each student.

The solution:

With a smaller group, however, you can select the Publish a Project as a Lesson option in Adobe Captivate. This option prints the content of each slide so it appears as learning materials for the student, not screen shots—which happens when you use the Publishing Projects as Handouts feature. The lesson option prints the questions with the answer options but does not print the answer. While printing the document, you also can choose to generate an answer key.

Storyboard template

If you create large projects with multiple stakeholders and collaboration is crucial or reviews are required, the storyboard output will be handy. In this case, simply choose the Storyboard template.

The output for storyboard has two sections: A detailed view of each slide. It includes the slide properties like transition, navigation, audio, background image, and so forth. It also shows the objects within the slide (Figure 3). The other section is a brief summary of the whole project including the number of slides, duration of each slide, projects preferences used, quiz preferences specified, hidden slides, background audio, and so forth (Figure 4).

Figure 3. Figure storyboard: Sample storyboard output has two sections.

Figure 4. Sample summary that is part of the output for the storyboard template.

The scenario: Publishing projects as storyboards

You are a content designer and have been given a set of requirements to create an application for a client. You design the application using Adobe Captivate and want your manager to review it, but your manager doesn't have Adobe Captivate installed locally to review your project.

The solution:

In Adobe Captivate, you can select the Publish Your Project as a Storyboard option so that others can review a printed version of the project.

The storyboard option outputs two sections:

• A brief summary of the entire project such as the number of slides, duration of each slide, project preferences selected, quiz preferences, hidden slides, background audio, and so forth
• A detailed view of each slide, including each slide's properties, such as transition, navigation, audio, background image and so forth; it also shows the objects within each slide

Step-by-step templates

If you are a software developer or technical writer, you can quickly generate the basis of an online help topic in addition to your demonstration or simulation. You could either choose to type all the steps manually or simply publish your Adobe Captivate project as Microsoft Word Output, using the new Step-by-Step Template.

This template will print only the Text Captions out of your project, in an ordered way. It also shows the highlighted images present in the Slides. In addition to saving paper using this condensed format, you simply save time!

Figure 5. Sample Step-by-step output

The scenario: Publishing projects as step-by-step guides

You create online guides for gadgets. You have used Adobe Captivate to create demonstrations and simple "how to" step-by-step video tutorials. But now your company wants to include written copies of the steps along with the shipping package.

The solution:

You could either choose to type all the steps in a Microsoft Word document or simply publish your Adobe Captivate project as Word output using the new Step by Step option for publishing your Adobe Captivate content as printed material. This option prints the text captions of your project in order and shows the highlighted images within the slides.

Customizing the Adobe Captivate templates for print publishing

Adobe Captivate allows the users to make simple changes to the existing templates. (The templates are located at ..\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 2\Gallery\PrintOutPut …..)

Figure 6. Templates are available on your C drive and can be modified

Each template is a collection of tags. The various tags specify the insert position of slide, contents of the slide, item objects, insert pattern for the items, slide types, pattern for answer key of question slides, and so forth.

Figure 7. Open the templates in Microsoft Word and edit the tags to customize your Adobe Captivate Print outputs

Adobe Captivate makes a copy of the template, reads the tags within it, and keeps it in the memory. (In Windows you can check the Clipboard after the publish operation.) Adobe Captivate then reads the selected slides and inserts information according to specifications in the tag.

Each tag is demarcated with an opening and ending tag—for example:

This tag inserts the content of the slide. Depending on the type of slide, the tag specifies Adobe Captivate to insert the content in the required format.

Note: Format is a property of this tag that is hard-coded and cannot be customized. To see all available tags, download the Tag PDF.

The following sections explain how you can make simple changes to the print template options.

Customizing the step-by-step print template to create an index for your learning material

The step-by-step template shows a numbered list of captions present in the published slides and the highlighted images. You could also use this template to create an index for your printed document, which would be followed by the contents of the document, published using the lesson template.

Open the step-by-step template at C:\...\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 2\Gallery\PrintOutPut. (Adobe Captivate copies templates to your local machine whenever you select the Publish to Word option.) Copy the step-by-step template and change the "A Common Title" and "Chapter" within the template code:

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Removing images and highlights from the step-by-step document

To remove images and highlights from the printed document, delete the tags in red:

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Modifying the lesson and storyboard templates to show/hide answers for question slides

By default, the Lesson Template does not show the answers for Quizzes and includes an Answer key. If you want to show the answers inline, as in the Storyboard option—without all the other details shown in a printed storyboard project—you must add the correct answer tags.

Open the Lesson or Storyboard template at C:\...\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 2\Gallery\PrintOutPut. (Adobe Captivate copies templates to your local machine whenever you select the Publish to Word option.)

In either template, ANC1 relates to the first correct answer; ANCN relates to the other correct answers. The tags that specify whether the correct answers should appear are specified in the following code:

Imagine you want to show the answer for the multiple choice questions in the Lesson template. To do so, make the following changes in the lesson template:

Similarly, if you wanted a storyboard instead but didn't want the answers to appear, you would remove the following tag from the specified question tags:

Save the template in the User Profile folder: C:\Documents and Settings\User Profile\My Documents\My Adobe Captivate Projects\Templates\PrintOutput. Your saved location may vary. While publishing Adobe Captivate content as Word output, browse to this folder and select the new template you have created.

Where to go from here

Take a look at all the tags used in the various templates to become familiar with them. Get the complete description of the tags in the attached specification document.

Printing to Word using customizable templates is one of the most time saving and powerful features offered in Adobe Captivate 2. We leave it to you, the Adobe Captivate user community, to explore, understand, and use this feature to customize printed output and make e-learning a great experience.

Upload and share your custom templates in the Adobe Captivate Exchange.

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