Category: MS Producer

2 Caption Templates for MS Producer

If you purchase the MS Producer resource disk available here HERE you will find it contains an example of a Captioned Video template, along with this white paper captioning in Producer (MS Word format)

I found the one captioning template on the CD (captioned video with fixed-size slides) was a good beginning but quickly realized I needed several others. I made two more, which can be downloaded below. To use these templates, unzip them, and put the entire folders into the Producer templates directory on your C drive.
Within Producer, they will show up within the Templates area as:

“Standard Captioned Audio – Resizable Slides” Download Zip File (36K)
and “Standard Captioned Video (320×240) – Resizable Slides” Download Zip File (36K))

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Symbol fonts not displaying in MS Producer

A client gave me a powerpoint presentation recently that contained a lot of symbols: arrows, greater-than-or-equal-to signs, and the like. They showed up fine in the powerpoint, but once incorporated into an MS Producer presentation, and published, they disappeared, or changed into letters.

It turns out the reason for this is that fonts are embedded into powerpoint presentations, but Producer is creating HTML pages, which of course are dependent on the end viewer’s computer for fonts, and on browser options for default font preferences.

When inserting symbols in powerpoint, (on a PC) it is not immediately obvious that you are switching fonts. By default, when you select “Insert Symbol” the font that comes up highlighted in the dialog is “Symbol” which does not always show up in a finished Producer presentation. Select another font, like Arial or Times New Roman and choose one of their symbols – they have almost as many.

The alternative would be to position graphics of the symbols in place of temperamental text characters. However, this isn’t such a great solution, since you can’t place inline graphics inside text boxes, so the symbols won’t stay in postion, especially if the font size varies a bit depending on the user’s computer.

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Script Errors in MS Producer

We use MS producer quite a bit for synching video to powerpoint, although since it’s a free application, it isn’t terribly well supported by Microsoft. It’s only useful for an environment that is mostly Windows based, since presentations made with it won’t play on anything but IE for Windows.

There was a problem with a presentation that would play fine on some computers, but would start up normally then stop with a script error before playing any video. It turned out that I had associated some of the Table of Contents entries with points on the video, rather than just with slides, as I normally do. Apparently machines running older versions of Windows Media Player (6.0.4) don’t play those kind of script commands. The machines that did play it had been upgraded to WMP 9.

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