Displaying a long policy in Presenter

Jun 03, 2011

I have an 8-page policy statement that I'd need to display on a single slide with a vertical scrollbar.  After some playing around, I settled on including a pdf as a web object and ran into a usability problem as follows:   Clicking inside the pdf content turns Articulate navigation a darker-gray, disabling all the navigational controls.  The student is now stuck on that page.  I was able to find no way out of this situation.

Is there a workaround for this?  Known problem?  Or a better way to display a document like this?

11 Replies
Sam Carter

Well, "processing" never finished, but skipping to the library, I found the result had completed and it does look great.

One big problem (for me) with this solution is that it doesn't have an option to download the final for inclusion.  It is only loadable from their website.  Judging from the number of objects that are loaded to play that seems to be by design.  This is an issue when corporations setup firewalls that block employee access from certain websites.  It would require IT intervention to white-list this website so the flash could play.

If there are proposals other than this, I'd appreciate any help.

Dwayne Schamp

You could make reference to it, show an image of the first page of the document, then instruct them to open it from the Attachments tab. this will open in a new window and allow them to print it at their leisure. There is no way to tell if they actually read the document though, either using this method or using a web object.

I have used your first method with success in the past. Have you tried to incorporate the webobject using an iFrame as the wrapper for the page containing the PDF embedded source?

Heather Thomas

Hi Sam,

I was looking for a way to do this for the same exact reason. We are implementing a policy update assignment at our organization, and it was too confusing for them to click a link that would open the policy PDF in a separate window. I created a web object to embed the policies in the eLearning. You are correct, my navigational buttons did not show on top of the web object. However, I adjusted the web object space to only take up 4/5ths of the screen. On the bottom fifth I created a bubble that said "Read the policies in this document by using the scroll bar to the left. Progress to the next slide to verify your acknowledgment... yadda yadda." The navigational buttons appear on this bottom fifth. This seems to do the trick.

Sam Carter

I came to the conclusion that my problem stemmed from my workstation having Adobe Acrobat Pro (a part of the Adobe CS5 suite).  I am not absolutely sure of this, but I strongly suspect that clicking inside the pdf embedded in Articulate caused Acrobat Pro to enter editing mode, taking control away from Presenter and graying out the Articulate controls.  I can find no way to get out of edit mode and return control to Articulate Presenter's PLAY/PAUSE controls.  The course is stuck.

This is repeatable on my workstation.  As long as I do not click the pdf content itself, and carefully use the scroll bar to view the pdf content, I have no problems.

Heather Thomas

Hi Sam,

I have Adobe Acrobat Pro as well. I saved my PDF and hosted it on my intranet site. When it is embedded into my course, I am able to click the hyperlinks in the PDF to jump around the document correctly. Do you have your PDF saved and hosted online correctly? Can you access the PDF link outside of the course without problems?

Jim Heiliger

Besides including the PDF as an Articulate attachment, place the PDF in the root folder of your project (where the PowerPoint and PPTA files reside) and create a hyperlink to the PDF. It will open the PDF in a separate browser and should not adversely impact Articulate. I do this all the time with no issues.

Just be certain to manually copy the PDF to the root level of your published package.

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