Work with themes in Adobe Captivate Classic

Themes help your project look better with coordinated colors, well-planned layouts for slides, fonts and effects. When you create a project, a default theme is applied to the project. You can change the theme by choosing one of the preloaded themes that are shipped along with Adobe Captivate Classic. You can customize a theme, save it as a different theme, and reuse it for other projects.

Each theme consists of the following:

• Master slides (a minimum of seven)

  • Main master slide, prefixed with the name of the theme

  • Content master slide

  • Question master slides (5 numbers)

• Object styles. For example, the 'Woody' theme contains styles such as Woody caption style, Failure, and Success captions.

• Skin and TOC settings related to the theme

• Recording defaults

For a description about these slides, see Master slides.

You can modify each of these component of a theme. For more information, see Customize themes.

The Themes bar (Themes > Themes) shows a representative content master slide of a theme.

Templates and themes

The difference between templates and themes is that templates decide 'when' and 'where' content (including media) is to be placed while themes decide how the project looks. For example, consider that you want a standard approach to all the elearning courses developed by your team. You require a pretest followed by content and then a post-test. You can create a template with the required type of slide placeholders and also decide the number of slides that each of these sections contain.

On the other hand, if you need an aquatic theme for the project background with coordinated colors for the slides, you apply a theme.

The recommended workflow is to use a theme within the project template. By doing so, you can ensure that the projects based on the template use a standard theme.

Apply a theme

To apply a theme to a project, perform the steps below:

Theme fonts and Theme colors

When designing your eLearning project, you often need to comply with the branding guidelines that your client provides. These guidelines could relate to the fonts to be used in the project, color schemes to be used, or other guidelines.

In earlier versions of Captivate Classic, if you wanted to incorporate new fonts in your project, you would navigate to the Object Style Manager, and change the font to the required font across all types of objects, types of captions, and apply the change everywhere.

This approach to changing the fonts is time consuming and also prone to errors.

The Update 2 of the 2019 release of Captivate Classic introduces the ability to change the fonts and colors of a theme with minimal clicks while maintaining high productivity. 

Change theme fonts

Change theme colors

You can also change the colors of the theme that you had applied to your project. On the Theme Properties dialog, choose the color scheme that you want to apply to the existing theme.

To save the changes, click Done.

Apply themes

Click Themes in the toolbar, select any default or customized theme of your choice from the drop down and click. You get a dialog asking you to confirm if you are ok with overriding existing styles and properties with this new theme. Once you confirm, the theme is applied to your project. 

You can browse for more themes from the drop-down, choose any .cptm file and apply the theme to your project. 

You can apply themes to projects directly or use them in project templates for a standard look and feel.

When you apply a theme to a project:

• For each slide in the project, Adobe Captivate Classic compares the linked master slide layout with those on the master slides in the theme you apply. If a matching layout is found, the slide is mapped to that master slide. If a match is not found, Adobe Captivate Classic creates a new master slide and then maps the slide.

• Objects, layouts, skin editor, and TOC that use default settings of the existing theme are mapped to the respective default styles in the applied theme. Any overrides to these elements are not retained in the project.

When you copy and paste a slide into another project, the theme of the target project is applied to the slide. If the slide contains objects and layouts that were overridden, the overridden settings are retained.

When you record a software simulation in a project, default captions and highlight boxes are mapped to the corresponding styles in the project theme.

Copy Source and Destination Theme

In Update 2 of the 2019 release of Captivate Classic, you can copy theme from a source project and apply the theme to a destination project. In other words, you can copy and paste with source formatting applied to the destination project:

Customize the Master Slides of the Theme

Create Master Slides with backgrounds, logos, headers, and so on, so that you can apply them to the standard slides of your project.

Customize themes

You can customize a theme by editing the constituent master slides, object styles, skin, theme colors, and TOC settings.

For information on customizing:

• Master slides, see Master slides.
• Object styles, see Object style.
• Theme settings in the skin of a project, see Skins.
• Theme settings in TOC, see Table of contents (TOC).
• Recording defaults, see Set recording preferences.
• Theme colors, see customize theme colors.

To save a customized theme, click Themes > Save Theme. Themes are saved as CPTM files.

Reuse themes across projects