Arial Font and Kerning Issue

Oct 30, 2014

Hassan Mujtaba
By Hassan Mujtaba

Hi,

I am using Arial in one of my SL2 projects. Text looks fine while developing, however once I publish it, it gets improper kerning. Space after characters 'u', 'n', 'h', 'm' looks loose. This problem is more obvious when Player Size is set to 'Scale player to fill browser window'. I have viewed the publish version both on local driver and network.

My testing environment meets all the requirements described here . Monitor DPI is set to 96. Cleartype option is on. 

Arial had no issues in SL1. This is an SL2 issue. I have attached a sample SL2 file, published version and highlighted Screen shot. 

Thanks, 

43 Replies
Daniel Novak
over 8 years ago12/01/15 at 10:22 pm (UTC)

Here's a workaround that worked for us on one of our lessons using Arial in titles.  The problem seems to affect 'square' letters like M, T, and L.  You may have to experiment to find which letters work best with this change:

1.       Select the letter (and only the letter).

2.       In the Home ribbon, select Character Spacing:

Home Ribbon, Font, Character Spacing

 

3.       Select Tight in the dropdown.

4.       (strongly suggested) Preview the slide to confirm layout.

You may have to undo this change if a future update resolves the problem, but this seems to make the text look normal on Publish and Preview for us.

Regards,

-- Dan Novak

Erik P.
almost 8 years ago05/18/16 at 5:43 am (UTC)

Like others, I'm very disappointed about Articulate's lack of addressing this issue ! As I already wrote, we are producing e-learning contents for one of the major companies in our country. They have strong CI/CD requirements and there is no way for us to use workarounds like "Open Sans" or other ones.

4 months ago (!) Ashley wrote "Once we do have additional information to share we'll be certain to post here." and nothing happend. I think this issue doesn't get the prioritiy handling it should get. Very disappointing.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
almost 8 years ago05/25/16 at 8:33 pm (UTC)

Hi all,

We’ve been discussing this issue with our QA team as they’ve continued testing and looking at the reported issues in this forum thread and others. It seems if we look back to when the initial reports occurred they were prior to Update 5 of Storyline 2, and since then there have been continued improvements in the font rendering and a noticeable difference in the kerning behavior for the better. I’d want to first remind everyone that you’ll want to be on the latest update of Storyline 2 Update 9 available here.

Our team has also noticed that if the published output is set to scale within the browser it will appear clearer at the larger size than the default size, and you won’t see this clearer behavior in preview as it will never scale up to fill the window. So you’ll want to refer to the published output vs. the slide stage or preview to see an accurate representation of what is expected and final.

As we continue to look at ways to improve the font kerning issue and your experience, I’d ask if you have a current project using the latest update that is still not displaying as you’d like if you could share it with us here or send it along to our Support Engineers referencing this thread so that we can get that into the hands of our QA team. We’ll want to know as much information about where you’re seeing the kerning (font, font size, specific characters used) and how you’re viewing the published output (browser, LMS vs. web, setting the player/browser to scale, etc.) as you can share so that we’re able to replicate and test the set-up to match.

Simon Taghioff
over 6 years ago01/24/18 at 9:21 pm (UTC)

Hey folks,

Great news! We’ve just released an update to Storyline 360 which addresses the issues raised on this thread.

As we investigated, we realized there was an opportunity to make far broader improvements to the way Storyline renders text. The result is a brand new text rendering engine for Storyline – we call it Modern Text.

Once you have the update installed, new projects will use Modern Text by default. To use Modern Text with an existing project, you’ll have to switch it on in the Fonts menu under the ‘Design’ ribbon tab.

Text now looks beautiful and flows naturally wherever it’s used. What you see on the stage is what you’ll see in the finished output. We intelligently choose the best font to use where multiple fonts in the same family are available. Finally, text in input fields or variable %referenced% text will now always use the correct font when you publish as HTML5.

This has been a massive undertaking that’s touched almost every part of Storyline that uses text.

We appreciate your patience while we’ve been through this process and hope that you’ll agree the final result has been worth the wait.

The update is available today for Storyline 360 customers. We’ll also be releasing this as a free update for Storyline 3 customers in the coming weeks, and will make sure we let you know as soon as it’s available.

Thanks again,

- Simon

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