What is "Publish To New Folder?"

Question

Captivate's *Edit/Preferences/Global* preferences include
options for the user to review a confirmation dialog before the
software proceeds to execute a variety of user actions, mostly
actions that would delete an asset or change an important setting.
"Publish to New Folder" is one of those confirmation-optional
preferences. One customises Captivate either to require
confirmation before executing some underlying command or to proceed
with its execution unhindered.
But what is the underlying "Publish to New Folder" command?
What does it do? Where do I find it? There doesn't seem to be
documentation about it, or discussion of it in the user community.
Oddly, one would think that publishing to an *existing* folder
would be the more concerning action. entailing as it does the
possibility of files being overwritten. What possible harm,
necessitating verification, could possibly be done publishing
something to a brand new folder? And what does Captivate mean by
"publish" in this instance: Is it a reference to the limited menu
of export-as-SWF or as projector.EXE options, or does it refer to
some other export, save or archiving function?
Having been at considerable pains to create a Captivate
project which deploys multiple graphic and audio assets I now would
like to wrap them all up and deliver them efficiently to an
archive, a function most other multi-asset authoring platforms
allow one to do with a mouse click or two. (See PremierPro, for
example, although neither Flash nor FrameMaker is so
sophisticated.) Can this be accomplished by some hidden "Publish to
New Folder" command?
Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi Ruth3rf0rd
Captivate 3 introduced an unwelcome feature that forces you
to create a folder named identically to your .SWF and ,HTM files
when creating your .SWF output. (Oddly enough, this doesn't happen
if publishing to .EXE).
Aside from simply naming the project what you want the folder
named, there isn't any underlying process you are missing. The
option you see in the preferences area simply turns the
intermediate dialog off and on. And you did mention that it could
theoretically be more dangerous to overwrite files. That option is
there as well.
Because I come from the RoboHelp HTML/Web Authoring
background, I find the whole notion of "Publishing" to be wrongly
named. For Captivate, the act of Publishing is taking the source
material and compiling it to produce the output format.
In the Web Development world, the act of Publishing is taking
content that has already been created from the source and copying
it to another location. Most often, a Web Server.
Hopefully this helps... Rick