Step three – the publishing phase

Step three is where you make your project available to your learners. Captivate allows you to publish your course modules in a wide variety of formats. The two formats that you will use most of the time are the Flash and the HTML5 formats:

• Flash is the historical publishing format of Captivate. Publishing the project in Flash makes the deployment of your eLearning courses very easy; only the Flash Player plugin is needed. The very same Flash Player that is used to read Flash-enabled websites is all you need to play back your published Captivate projects. The major caveat of this publishing format is that it is not supported on mobile devices. This publishing method is fading out today, as Adobe announced the end of the free Flash Player plugin for the year 2020. 
• Captivate can also publish your projects in HTML5, which makes the project available on any device, including desktops and laptops, as well as tablets and smartphones. In today's technological landscape, HTML5 has become the preferred format for publishing your online courses for computers and mobile devices.

Note that some features of Captivate are only available either in Flash or in HTML5. For example, Responsive Projects and Virtual Reality Projects can only be published in HTML5, while a Text Animation object can only be published in Flash. It is very important to know the publishing format you will use before starting the development of a new project.

The end of the Flash Player
In July 2017, Adobe made an announcement that they would no longer develop and maintain the Flash Player plugin beyond 2020, and that they encourage content developers to migrate to HTML5. This is not a surprise, but it stresses the important evolution that HTML5 represents for our industry. It also clearly states that Adobe Captivate is bound to end up as an HTML5-only authoring tool at some point in the future. You can see the original Adobe announcement at https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html and the announcement from the Captivate team at https://elearning.adobe.com/2017/07/flash-the-future-of-interactive-content-for-elearning/.

Captivate can also publish the project as a standalone application (.exe on Windows and .app on Macintosh) or as video files that can be easily uploaded to YouTube and viewed on a tablet or smartphone.

Step three will be covered in great detail in Chapter 15, Finishing Touches and Publishing.