PowerPoint Integration into Lectora
November 14, 2006 12:00 AM
Actually, in that particular case the objects did NOT come in at the proper location. Only a few pixels off but enough to mess up a couple of things. Here is where I am at with my efforts (getting close I think):I am using Lectora 2006, what must be the latest version of the Integrator, and PowerPoint 2003. My final title is 775 x 474 pixels. The integrator is rounding down my height from 475 to 474 pixels—I can easily live with that. I did a screen capture of my background (consisting of a header and a footer, both using gradients). I pasted this into PowerPoint. I also saved the capture as a jpeg and imported it into PowerPoint—I basically got the same result either way. When I checked the size of this background image in PowerPoint I learned that it was 8.08" by 4.95". I double-checked and these measurements are in proportion with my 775 x 474 final title size.As I am pretty sure from my experiments that the Integrator is somehow using the size of the PowerPoint slides to determine what to adjust and how, I made the PowerPoint slides I am working with the same size as the background I imported (8.08" xy 4.95"). My page titles are 14pt bold and my primary text objects are 12pt bold. If I work with these sizes in PowerPoint, what I get looks virtually the same as when I use the same point sizes in Lectora. In short, I seemed to have found the PowerPoint size that would most closely match my Lectora size.I ran the Integrator and told it my custom size was 775 (which is where it calculated the 474 height). I also told it not to import transitions (which seems to add lots of actions that clutter up the output needlessly). What it produces is the correct page size, my text objects are the correct size and in the correct position, and the simple graphics come over with no noticeable distortion and in approximately the correct position. Based on what I have heard, I expect I may need to manipulate graphics in some cases—especially if they are complicated. So far, the only thing I have detected that is not quite right is that the 14pt text has been reduced to 13pt and the 12pt text has been reduced to 11pt. If I manually adjust these back to 14pt and 12pt respectively, the result looks about as close to the original PowerPoint slides as I would hope.I have also learned from others' input how I can use the default font for the title to change one of these pretty quickly. Therefore, I am thinking about boosting the size of the page title font in PPT so it will import at 14pt to eliminate the need to manipulate their sizes after integration. Then, I can use a trick I was told about changing Lectora's default font to quickly make all the 11pt text 12pt.I have tried importing using the PowerPoint Tool in the Lectora software and I'm getting the same basic result though sometimes things don't inherit as I would expect. At this point, using the Integrator by itself seems to be working the best for me.I've got several resources looking for a simpler, quicker method. If I learn something I will be sure to share it here.Lee
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