Today’s post focuses on one of the reasons why I have been so quiet recently At the tail end of 2006 I was asked if I would be prepared to create a series of getting started tutorials for Dreamweaver CS3. Due to the incredibly positive feedback I received month after month, from the original Dreamweaver 8 Getting Started series I created a couple of years ago, the only answer I could give was “Yes!”
Initially, I had hoped that I would be able to repurpose a lot of the content I had previously created. However, due to the significant changes Adobe has made to Dreamweaver in Dreamweaver CS 3 and also the fact that the original tutorials were created using table-based layouts – so 2005 baby! I end up having to create virtually all of the Captivate project files again from scratch.
For the most part, one of the project components that I did manage to salvage was the caption text. This bring me nicely to the topic I want concentrate on, in this post - Exporting project captions to MS Word.
For those unfamiliar with this feature you can export your text captions to MS Word by choosing File > Import / Export > Export Project captions and closed captions…
In general the main reason why you would want to export text captions to MS Word would be to localize (translate) your caption text into another language. This is why if you have ever used this feature and opened the resulting MS Word document you were presented with two columns one called Original Text Caption Data and the other Updated Text Caption Data.
If you are a regular visitor to this blog you’ll know that I am pretty passionate about the Captivate 2 feature set. I’ll be honest I love nothing more than being able to use, promote and talk about Captivate wherever I can. During the elearning technologies conference I spoke at back in January (2007) many delegates asked about how do localize there Captivate projects and I got a real buzz seeing the look on their faces when I explained that Captivate makes this just so simple but anyway I digress…
For this project I knew that although I would not be able to import the text captions from my existing project files into the new ones (Captivate does not allow you to do this) I had to create for Dreamweaver CS3. What I could do, was to use MS Word’s Find and Replace tool to change all references in the text captions from Dreamweaver 8 to Dreamweaver CS3. And also change the name of the sample web site from Café Townsend to Aquo Drink (the name of the new sample site for the new version of Dreamweaver.)
Having made all required changes I then had to simply copy the text from the MS Word document and paste this into each of the new text captions I inserted into my new project files.
Although this might not seem like a big deal, it did mean that I didn’t have to type all the text for each of the text and failure captions and it also gave me the satisfaction of knowing that nowhere in the Getting Started series (thanks to MS Word’s Find and Replace feature) were there going to be any references to the original sample site “Café Townsend”
