multimediacollege, Adobe Authorized Training Centre

And another one from me, yes it’s blog-day today :-d

A question I often get from my students, but haven’t had time to get back on: When Captivate automatically adds captions to your demo while recording, they’re in English by default (depending on your settings). You can change the default language by going to the advanced section in the recording window. However, you can also create your own ‘language’, meaning that you can set any language of your choice as the default language. This can also come in handy when you don’t like the standard texts Captivate adds, e.g. “The … window opens”. To create your own default language, browse to the Captivate folder in program files, and copy-paste one of the CaptureTextTemplates_<language>.rdl. E.g.: make a copy of CaptureTextTemplates_English.rdl and rename it CaptureTextTemplates_myLanguage.rdl. Open the file in a text editor and it will contain all the standard texts Captivate uses as objects with events, for example:

<Object DefaultTemplate=”Click the %s title bar”>
<Event Template=”Drag the %s title bar”/>
<Event Template=”Dragging the %s title bar”/>
<Event Template=”Drop the %s title bar”/>
<Event Template=”Double-click the %s title bar”/>
<Event Template=”Right Click the %s title bar”/>
<Event Template=”Double-click the %s title bar”/>
<Event Template=”Double-click the %s title bar”/>
</Object>

These are for example the text of the captions that get added to your project by Captivate whenever you perform one of the mentioned actions: For example: If you right-click the title bar. A caption will be added saying:

“Right click the <window name> title bar”

<Event Template=”Right Click the %s title bar”/>

If you change this text into:

<Event Template=”We have just right-clicked the %s title bar”/>

The caption will read “We have just right-clicked the <name of window> title bar”

%s is replaced by the name of the window. if you remove %s,  the text will be:

“We have just right-clicked the title bar”

You can translate the standard texts in the same way. All you need to do now is save the file and fire up Captivate. In the advanced section of the recording window, select the desired language from the ‘Captions In’ dropdown list, your language should appear. In this case the language is ‘myLanguage’. You can do this in both Captivate 3 and 4 and the good news is: you can copy-paste the files between the CP3 and CP4 folders.

Don’t forget to set your spelling correction to the appropriate language (if possible)