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From: cjp717 on 5 Nov 2007 09:32
I am creating a large online grammar assessment for my company. I quickly
determined that Captivate isn't robust enough to do all the things I need it to
do so I'm playing with Authorware. Each screen will have multiple sentences in
which the user has to select incorrect words. I want the words to change color
when selected. This is easy to do if I have a hot spot over every word but the
assessment is large and I'd rather do this with a few arrays and take advantage
of the wordclicked variable. Is there a way to dynamically change the text of a
word by using a function? I haven't found one yet.

Thank you,
Carol P.

From: Erik **AdobeCommunityExpert** on 5 Nov 2007 10:00
Unfortunately, this is one of the few (many?) problems with Authorware -
very poor text-handling capabilities.
The common approach for handling this is by embedding two 'test'
statements in the display icon (with its properties set to 'update
displayed variables').

Something like:
{Test(myVar,"text that appears if myVar is
true","")}{Test(myVar,"","text that appears if myVar is false)}

Where the first 'Test' statement is one color (say, black) and the
second Test statement is another color (say, blue).

So when myVar is true, the black text appears. When myVar is false, the
blue text appears.

Needless to say, this is a bit cumbersome for large amounts of text, but
really the only decent *native* Authorware approach. So for your need,
instead of 'myVar', you could have something like:
{Test(wordclick="potato","text that appears if myVar is
true","")}{Test(wordclick<>"potato","","text that appears if myVar is
false)}

All that said, there was a post just recently by a fellow who has made a
..u32 which does much more 'modern' text handling. See the post titled
'Unicode Text Engine' on 11/2, which points to this site:
http://www.writewell.ca/index.php/atre

I can't vouch for the reliability but some feedback from other users
indicate it works well.
G'luck,
Erik

cjp717 wrote:
> I am creating a large online grammar assessment for my company. I quickly
> determined that Captivate isn't robust enough to do all the things I need it to
> do so I'm playing with Authorware. Each screen will have multiple sentences in
> which the user has to select incorrect words. I want the words to change color
> when selected. This is easy to do if I have a hot spot over every word but the
> assessment is large and I'd rather do this with a few arrays and take advantage
> of the wordclicked variable. Is there a way to dynamically change the text of a
> word by using a function? I haven't found one yet.
>
> Thank you,
> Carol P.
>

--
Erik Lord
http://www.capemedia.net
Adobe Community Expert - Authorware
http://www.adobe.com/communities/experts/
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*Search the A'ware newsgroup archives*
http://groups.google.com/group/macromedia.authorware
From: cjp717 on 5 Nov 2007 10:05
Erik,

Thank you for taking the time to respond AND include sample code. Because this
is so large, I may just use the array idea and have a screen display that shows
the list of words clicked in the box. I added a RESET and SUBMIT button so this
may be the easiest approach. I will check out the other post as well. THANKS!
Carol P.

From: Abysmalk01 on 5 Nov 2007 11:07
I have just released a text display engine that you can get at
http://www.writewell.ca/index.php/atre which allows you to build text strings
at runtime and change their colors. I also have that exact kind of interaction
built for one of my projects as well if you would like to talk about it offline.

Jason

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