Lectora 12 was released in December, 2014…and in a reflection of their commitment to the product, Trivantis has quickly released a patch to address some issues found with that most recent version (which ties nicely to one of our 2015 predictions that Trivantis will re-assert their product. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Adobe respond that quickly…)

See the release notes here for the Lectora 12.0.1 patch. If you are a current Lectora 12 user, you may have noticed the patch availability through the auto-update feature within the product. If not,  you can download the patch directly.

If you’re fairly new to Lectora, or want to get a general insight to the capabilities, visit their demo page for variety of ‘How-To’ and other sample courses.

Lectora is an often-underrated product with a strong history. Lectora 12 seems to have two primary goals:

1. Improving the back-end HTML in published courses to better comply with ADA/508 and Web Content Accessibility (WCA) guidelines.
2. Enhancing usability and designer flexibility when working with media assets (text, images, shapes, buttons).

See the “what’s new” page for a summary… And as a nice example of the improvements in practice, here’s a helpful post on customizing button states in the latest version.

Note: If you open a project in Lectora 12 that was originally developed in an earlier version (v. 11 or v.X), Lectora will automatically create a backup copy of the original AWT file. The file is placed in the same folder with an extension of .awt12. If you ever need to access that file, rename the extension to .awt to open the unmodified original copy.

Another Note: Publishing to .exe is still available, it’s just called ‘Offline’ in the Publish options now (“Publish for Offline Use”).

eLearning Brothers also have a nice summary of the new Lectora 12 features…as well as an entire template section for the product.

You can sign-up for a free 30-day trial from their website, where you can choose to try the classic download version or ‘Lectora in the Cloud’. And to wrap up, checking out any product’s support forums is a great way to help evaluate a product, whether as a first-time user or to check if applying a patch causes any new issues.