Adobe Captivate: Highlight Boxes in Reverse

Highlight Boxes added to a Captivate project provide an excellent way to direct a user's attention to a specific area in your Captivate project.

If you have spent any time in Captivate, you have likely added at least one Highlight Box to your project. If you haven't, you'll find that you can add them easily enough via Insert > Highlight Box.

After the Highlight Box appears on the slide, you can drag it to a desired location and resize it appropriately. You would then use the Timeline to control when the Highlight Box appears on the slide. Assuming you haven't made the Fill Transparency too high or too low (80% is typical), when a user interacts with your published lesson, the area in the middle of a typical Highlight Box will darken just enough to command the user's attention. While the middle of the highlighted area gets darker, the rest of the slide remains unchanged.

There is a Highlight Box feature you may not have realized is available... I call it "the old Reverse Highlight Box."

When inserting a Highlight Box, there is an innocent-looking option at the left of Highlight Box tab: Fill outer area.



If you enable Fill outer area and lower the Fill transparency (in the picture below, the value has been lowered to 0), the Highlight Box will actually block everything outside the Highlight box area (basically the reverse behavior of a typical Highlight Box).



While not appropriate for every situation, Highlight Boxes with filled outer areas are ideal if the interface you are discussing is cluttered. And you certainly don't have to lower the Fill transparency all the way to 0 (as was shown above, which would completely knock out the background). Instead, you can experiment with a Fill transparency value that works best for you.

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Comments

[Kara]

I love the fill outer area feature but I am having some trouble with it! When I fill the outer area, the information within the highlight box itself also darkens and becomes difficult to read. Am I doing something wrong?

I picked grey as the fill color, clicked the box for fill outer area and set the transparancy to 50%. When I preview, the background fades to the grey, but the box doesn't stay a crisp clear. I want end-users to be able to read what is within the highlighted box.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the purposes of this feature? Anyone else experiencing this? (Also, I am using Captivate 4, if that matters)

Thank you!