Adobe Captivate 4 has added a number of new actions. This blog entry will deal with two of them – Hide and Show.
In this post we had seen how to add footers to slides in Adobe Captivate 4. The post ended with a promise of providing an action twist. In this post, we will try to create two sets of footers in a captivate project. And we will achieve that end using the new actions – Hide and Show.
Before we start off, we need to think of "name". What’s in a name? – some people will say. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" – they will add. Others will point to King James Bible saying – "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold". As for me – I just wanted to tell you that in Adobe Captivate 4, objects can have names. You can now assign your favorite names to your favorite objects. If you don’t want to assign names to (unfavorable) objects – no problem, captivate will assign default names to them. Names are to be found in the "Options" tab of an items’ property dialog, under "Name" group box, beside "Item Name" label. Names of objects need to be unique throughout a project. Here’s a little SWF where you see how to view and change item names.
What is the relevance of "names" in creating two sets of footers? Hang on a little. We will get there.
Here’s the project that we will start off from. Some important features of the project are:
- It contains 6 slides.
- The first slide contains a text caption with the following text : Slide $$cpInfoCurrentSlide$$ of $$rdinfoSlideCount$$.
- The name of this text caption is Footer1 and its duration is "rest of project".
Our aim is to have a different footer from slide 4 to slide 6. So, we will copy the caption (Footer1) from 1st slide and paste it on 4th slide. Now, Footer1 will be visible from slide 1 to slide 6. And our new caption will be visible from slide 4 to slide 6. We need to hide Footer1, from slide 4 onwards.
Herein lies the relevance of "names". Since text caption on first slide has a name – namely Footer1, we can hide it referring to that name. Indicentally, in Adobe Captivate 4, slides can have navigation actions at both on-slide-enter and on-slide-exit (previously it was only slide-exit). We will use on-slide-enter and the action Hide, to hide Footer1 at slide 4. Enough talk. Here’s a demo showing how to do all that:
Here’s the resultant SWF, the one that is "supposed" to show a different footer from slide 4 to slide 6.
Ooh-la-la…. Did you see that? The new footer was visible alone in 4th slide. But from 5th, the old footer made a comeback. IT JUST REFUSES TO BE HIDDEN FOR LONG!!!
It turns out that, for objects with duration "rest of project", you can hide/show them for only one slide at a time !!! Is it a bug? Is it a feature? Well, one man’s bug is another man’s feature. But the bottomline is – We need to keep Footer1 (see, with a name I can keep referring to it easily !!), hidden from slide 4 to slide 6. What do we do? We turn to our man friday – "Apply to All". We select slide 4,5 & 6, open up, slide 4 and try to apply it properties to all selected slides. Alas !! IT DOES NOT WORK. Sigh.
Now, Is that a bug? Is that a feature? :-) Sometimes life is just so unfair and cruel.
Don’t lose heart. If life decided to throw lemons at us, we will make a lemonade out of it. We will manually hide Footer1 in slide 5 and slide 6 in the same way as we did for slide 4. Once we do that, we have the desired result. Here’s the final project. And here’s a demo of the final behavior.
This blog started with a promise of exploring "Show" and "Hide". We have seen "Hide" in action. But where’s the "Show". Well, not all promises are to be kept. Use of show is left as an exercise. You may think of using it to revert back to Footer1 in from slide 7 onwards (by the way – in that case Footer2 needs to be hidden).
Now, think of the case, where you have many slides (around 50) and footers are always customized for 3-4 slide each. Because ‘Apply to All’ does not behave in a way we want, can you imagine the pain you have to go through – you need to create multiple actions (showing one and hiding all other footers) for each slides. In the next post, we will try to use scripting to alleviate this problem to some extent. Till then – Adios !!!