Very frustrated with the default text settings in this program.
Why are all the default text settings light gray?
Light gray does not contrast with anything! Against a light background, you can’t read it. Against a dark background, you can’t read it.
Why is Tahoma (and sometimes Times Roman) the default? Make it Arial … make it darkest black … and make it bold.
While I love all the capabilities of this software, I spend so much time monkeying around with the appearance because all the default settings are very lame. And changing those settings to an acceptable default is a very time consuming process that does not carry over from project to project. It would take a project budget just to try and get the default settings of this software acceptable, due to the non-intuitive and time intensive process it takes to adjust the object settings, which is not an option on time/budget constrained projects.
There should be an option in this program such that when you are done monkeying with the text, font, color settings etc. for a line of text you can just point and click and make that the default setting from here to eternity for everything instead of having to sculpt every single line of text from scratch each and every time (because applying this to that only affects that … not the next very similar piece of text because it is categorized for this or that).
Text and object settings in the quizzes are especially lame.
Something glaringly missing in this program is an ability to just highlight a string of text and match formatting and then click on another string of text and walllah! There it is. Format matched (like PowerPoint).
Here are some links:
http://blog.lilybiri.com/whats-in-a-theme-a-template
http://blog.lilybiri.com/theme-colors
You can set a theme as default, by using the right-click menu on the thumbnail. BTW the most simple theme, Blank, is still available (should be default theme, because custom themes are often based on it) but you have to use the Browse button to find it.
Lieve,
Thank you for your insight and explanations. I will explore the links to your blog that you provided. And now that you mention it, yes my theme is currently set to “Pearl.” Perhaps this is an easier issue for me to fix/mitigate than I thought if some of the other themes have darker/bolder text styles.
After release I immediately asked why they did choose the worst theme as Default theme. Try another one, some are bit better. You could change the theme colors palette, but the use of colors is so inconsistent that this can lead to weird results.
For consultancy and/or training I always create a custom theme, starting with setup of the theme colors. It is very important to have some contrast colors. A good site to see color palettes is Adobe Color (there is also an app) which you can use free. They will give you a theme with only 5 colors, Captivate’s palette has 10. You can always add black, white and eventually another accent color.
You may have missed everything I wrote about the importance of Themes in Captivate!
The theme ‘Pearl’ which is now set as default theme is also in my opinion a bad example, should not have been the default theme at all. The Theme Colors palette is a grayscale palette, you should have heard me cursing. As for contrast, and the likes for gray colors, that sees to be usual nowadays because the developers probably are very young and have perfect eyes.
As for the font, that is a personal choice. I never use Arial, but find some nice Typekit fonts. Bored with Arial. Times New Roman is used in Captivate on runtime when the developer’s font cannot be found on the user’s system and it is used in dynamic text.
Each basic training which I offer, has focus on Timeline, Quiz and THEMES. I discovered that when someone asks for a personalized advanced training, I mostly need to explain Themes (and often also Timeline) before being able to dive into more advanced features. I am used to post links in another answer, to avoid waiting time due to moderation.
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