Prior to publishing a Captivate project, you should spend a few minutes filling in fields you will find in the Project Information window (via File > Project Info).
Among other things, you'll find the Project Name and Description fields. Why bother filling out these fields? The Project Name, which can contain spaces, appears in the title bar of the Web browser when the lesson is first opened by your learner. The Project Name and the Description are both read aloud by a screen reader (which is a critical component of section 508 compliance). And any of the information you add to the Project Information can be used by system variables, allowing you to display the information within text captions anywhere in the project. (That's something you learn how to do in my Captivate 5: Beyond the Essentials online class.)
In fact, filling in the fields within the Project Information window is so important, and so simple, I encourage my beginner Captivate students to fill it in as well. (From a beginner perspective, the information can be displayed on a TOC, something you learn to do during class.)
So what could go wrong by following my advice and filling in the Project Info? Plenty it appears, such as the error message below:
It seems that fellow Captivate developer John T Wylie Jr., International Game Technology, ran face-first into the error message above when trying to publish. The message refers to actionscript keywords and user variables, but John wasn't using actionscript or user variables.
John sent me an email about the problem, but I had never seen that particular error message and, sadly, wasn't able to help.
John didn't give up. And he found the cause of the error in an unlikely place. It turns out that John's Captivate project was covering how to use a 103 inch display. In John's Description field, he did something unthinkable: he typed 103" display. Hence the problem. For whatever reason, Captivate does not like it if you use quote marks in the Description field.
On a whim, John removed the quote mark from the Description field (shown below) and the project published. Go figure!
The issue is apparently a bug and is covered in this post on the Captivate forum. A patch has not yet been released that fixes the issue. So until such time that there is a fix, avoid the quote marks. I'd tell you to quote me on that, but I'm not the one who did the work this time... quote John.
How do you customize the fields Captivate uses so you can use it as metadata. I don't need "Company" or "E-mail", etc. I have ten identifiers I want to "attach" to this project. Thx.
Posted by: K Davis | June 02, 2011 at 04:22 PM
That's a perfect use-case for user-defined variables. I've written some articles about that on the BLOG. A simple search will find them.
Posted by: Kevin Siegel | June 03, 2011 at 05:10 PM