Publishing To Offline Interactive PDF
Jan 10, 2014
Has anybody found a simple way to publish a module to an interactive PDF? In Captivate, it's just one of the publishing options, and the PDF file includes all the media, interactions, etc... all in one file as an interactive PDF.
The "simplest" way that I have found is to create portions of the module using various tools in Articulate Studio, inserting those into PowerPoint slides, then using the PowerPoint "Save as Adobe PDF" functionality. This doesn't seem efficient, and I would love to just build it in one tool (preferably Storyline).
The reason that I want to create a single PDF file instead of using a full folder of files with the html/swf/whatever in it is that I want the end user to only have a single file to keep track of, and I don't want them to be confused by folder/subfolder structures and the vague "story.(whatever)" naming convention. I know that I can go into the published folder and rename all the files to be more descriptive, but that seems to be a lot of extra work, especially when modules get updated.
Thoughts?
7 Replies
Hi Jaron and welcome to Heroes!
Storyline and Studio both have an option to print to Word, which you could turn into a PDF but this is designed more as a way to provide handouts/notes to users or as a way for you SME's to review the content before publishing. Since you need to deploy offline, have you looked at publishing for CD (or another local source)? I mention this as when publishing to CD, an autorun file is created, which causes your presentation to launch automatically if learners insert a CD or DVD containing your published output.
Thanks for the response Ashley. We also looked into publishing to a CD, but this creates an exe with an autorun.inf or loader.ini. Depending on individual cases, some don't have cd or dvd rom drives, and user permissions might not allow them to run exe's, ini's, msi's, or bat's (depending on various options for recreating the loader files). Additionally, for those that do have disc drives, the majority of them don't have autoplay enabled for discs, meaning that they again will have to go searching for the initiating files (again, that isn't intuitively named beyond what you name the folder).
Hi Jaron,
I'm not aware of any other ways in which you could publish for a local access.
Hi Ashley,
Is this still the case? I have run into an issue with Sakai - my client's version is not able to run SCORM. My learners are not technologically savvy and I think they may have issues downloading the files.
Hi Ronnie!
I'm not familiar with Sakai, but upon a quick glance it looks like they may be xAPI compliant.
Have you tried to export utilizing the Tin Can API?
As far as local use, this is still the case.
Has there been any solutions to this lately?
I have a client who's LMS is currently in transition and they are requesting an interactive PDF like captivate does. I can't see any solution that doesn't have a whole structure of files and folders associated with it. anybody?
There is no news on this.
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.