Article by Marije.
Published: March 6, 2010 at 17:17
Category: Captivate

Changing Captivate 3 and Captivate 4 text styles with Fonts.ini

Last week, on a rainy afternoon, I was going through the Captivate user guide when I stumbled upon a small .ini file in the Gallery folder which I hadn’t actively used, or played around with if you will, before. Although the following functionality is a bit buggy at times, it may make your Captivate life just that bit more pleasant

The Fonts.ini file is located in the Gallery folder in your Captivate directory. It enables you to give your captions a default font-style. For example: if you want all your Halo captions (HaloRed, HaloBlue etc.) to have a 6px purple underlined font by default, the Fonts.ini file is the one to turn to. You can open the file with any program that supports .ini (like Notepad, Word, Dreamweaver…).

The document contains lists of captions and their text styles. For example the first caption style reads:

[Adobe Red]
FontColor = FF0000

Meaning that the Adobe Red caption contains red text by default, as FF0000 is the hexadecimal colour for red.

When you change this to:

[Adobe Red]
FontColor = 000000

save the Fonts.ini and open Captivate, Your next Adobe Red text caption will have black text (hex. 000000) by default.

You can change the following settings:

FontName
FontSize
FontBold   (0 is normal, 1 is bold)
FontItalic  (0 is normal, 1 is italic)
FontUnderLined  (0 is normal, 1 is underlined)
FontColor  (in hexadecimals)

Any setting which you do not change uses the default setting which are:

;FontName = Arial
;FontSize = 12
;FontBold = 0
;FontItalic = 0
;FontUnderLined = 0
;FontColor = 000000

You can also add captions which are not in the list. For example, the following piece of code should change all the captions in the Halo series into a purple underlined text:

[HaloBlue]
FontColor = 681266D
FontSize = 6
FontUnderLined = 1
 
[HaloGreen]
FontColor = 681266D
FontSize = 6
FontUnderLined = 1
 
[HaloCaptivate]
FontColor = 681266D
FontSize = 6
FontUnderLined = 1
 
[HaloRed]
FontColor = 681266D
FontSize = 6
FontUnderLined = 1
 
[Halo]
FontColor = 681266D
FontSize = 6
FontUnderLined = 1
 
[HaloYellow]
FontColor = 681266D
FontSize = 6
FontUnderLined = 1

In this way you will not have to change any text styles in your captions by hand, Captivate does it all for you!

There are some things to take into consideration though:

• I’ve tested this for CP3 and CP4 (I don’t have CP2 anymore, bloody dinosaur)

• These style changes are permanent, even after restarting Captivate; save a copy of your original Fonts.ini just in case.

• When you set the captions in the Preferences >Recording>Defaults section to another text-style, the captions will be recorded in this style. However, when you go to the caption window in editing mode and you select the same caption style from the dropdown list, the text-style will change to the settings of the Fonts.ini.

• Save the Fonts.ini file and restart Captivate to activate your changes.

• In some cases you want to close the Fonts.ini file completely before starting  Captivate4 (otherwise it will not start)

• Keep the text in the caption selected before changing the caption style, otherwise the style will not change.

• Sometimes your captions will not change styles when you use the arrow keys to navigate through the captions dropdown menu. Click the desired caption with your mouse instead.

• Captivate does not change the style of the captions which are already in your project, so you need to create these settings before placing the on the slides.

Like I said, this technique is a bit buggy in CP3 and CP4; you’ll want to play around with it a bit.

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