Fonts and Adobe Captivate

There have been some questions in the comments of my videos that suggest that some people may not understand Typekit fonts in Adobe Captivate. This article will try to explain it.

There are three different types of fonts on a Windows or Mac computer running Adobe Captivate 2017. These are system fonts, web-safe fonts, and potentially Typekit fonts. The importance of font selection only really applies to responsive designed elearning projects, since non-responsive projects convert your text into pictures, and whichever font you choose will render correctly on any device.

System fonts are the fonts that are installed on your computer. It's important to know that when you use a unique and exciting font found on your computer, that what you see isn't what someone else would. For example, if I created a Microsoft Word document that used the BlackHawk font and I sent that Word document to someone who doesn't have that font installed, they will see an entirely different set of characters than what I intended (it will probably display as Times New Roman).

Web-safe fonts are a subset of system fonts that have such a high percentage of use that they can be considered universal. It's smart to use web-safe fonts when you design for the web since you don't know what devices will be used to view your content, and usually an excellent choice for when you develop responsive design eLearning. An example would be the Trebuchet font. Because there are only a handful of web-based fonts, using them may your eLearning seem ordinary.

But what do you do if you want to design a responsive project using something other than the half dozen web-safe fonts available? That's where web-based fonts like Typekit come into play.

Typekit works like this. If you have an Adobe ID, you will have access to a small selection of these web-based fonts. Once you find a font on Typekit.com that you would like to use in your Captivate project, you would sync that font to your account. Behind the scenes, a system version of that font is downloaded and installed on your computer so when you return to your Captivate project you can select and use that font. Later when you publish that project, you would supply Captivate with the root domain of where your project will reside. For example, if you were an employee at Adobe and were going to make your eLearning project available on Adobe's website, you would include *.adobe.com as a domain when you publish. When users would run this course, the published project would check Typekit.com and make sure this was authorized to use the font and display the correct font in the eLearning project even if the user doesn't have that font installed. Here is an overview on how Typekit works in Captivate 2017 Release.

Typekit is only one example of web-based fonts. I've also used fonts that can be found on Google fonts. The advantage of Google fonts is that there are no fees or limitations required to use them. Here is a video that explains how you can use Google fonts in your Captivate eLearning project.