Background

Captivate 4 had a bug that made project links always use absolute paths. The result was you couldn’t author a menu to launch lessons for playback from a CD. Adobe issued a patch that was supposed to fix it, and I tried it out. It didn’t seem to work on the files I was given to set up for CD delivery.

If you run into a similar circumstance, here is another way to accomplish the same thing.

Not Tracking

First off, this is for a project where there is a menu used to access a collection of lessons. You are going to run from a CD so you already decided you aren’t tracking anything. Or, if you have a way to track it, I would love to know more – please leave a comment!

The Menu

If your menu contains some intro material, put the menu slide last.

Duplicate it

Loop them by setting the last Slide load the previous one, and the next-to-last slide go to the next slide (default setting).

Change the project setting so that the presentation does not fade out at the end. This will ensure that the buttons will remain enabled and visible at all times.

Set up the button links as URLs that point to the .swf pages (or .html)

Captivate publishes for each lesson. Change the target setting from self to blank. This will make each lesson pop up in a new window, which circumvents the security errors that occur with Flash Player opening a new .swf in the same window.

Autorun

Captivate will generate an autorun file that will launch the menu in the system default browser if you check the option when publishing.