odd behavior with graphics post publishing

Mar 13, 2011

For some reason graphics are randomly changing to red Xs or other graphics after I publish a presentation. In most cases these are the hand-drawn arrows and other graphics found in the downloadable tools from this site, but in other cases it's the dash character in some of the handwriting fonts downloaded from this site. In still other cases the problem is with images. Any clue what's going on? Thanks.

10 Replies
Chris Fletcher

Have you been using copy and paste in other applications whist it was publishing? The publishing function of articulate uses the clipboard, so if you use the copy function, it can mess things up a bit.

That was the cause when It happened to me. I just published it again, making sure I didn't do any copying or pasting and it was fine.

May not be the same thing though...

Chris

Brian Batt

Hi Jens,

If you are experiencing unexpected issues using Articulate software, here are some tips for managing your files which can help prevent issues.

1.  Work on your local drive (your C: drive). Working on a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, including file corruption, loss of audio, and other unexpected behavior. 

2. You should also make sure the directory path to your project files and your published output is less than 260 characters (for example C:\Articulate).

3.  Avoid using special characters, accents or symbols in your file names.

Additional information regarding "Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces" in Windows operating systems can be found in the following Microsoft article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx

If you continue to have issues, please let me know.

Jens Svendsen

I just double-checked everything and I don't see any violation of those rules. I'm working directly on my local drive; the character count of the file path is 97 characters, and I have no special characters in the file name or path (unless single spaces count as special characters). I do backup the files to an external hard drive and I sometimes pull them from there onto my laptop to add text and sound (my desktop sound card conflicts with my Go Mic for some reason); but when I do that I always bring the entire project folder over and then overwrite the folder on my desktop when I migrate it back to my desktop machine. Could that have something to do with it?

Stephanie Harnett

I'm having the same issue. I thought that converting almost everything to a graphic would solve the problem BUT in a presentation of 84 slides the transparent graphics (PNGs) on the last 10 slides all came in with a blue background instead of a transparent background. When I took these 10 slides and placed them in a new file and published, it worked as expected. It seems like it a memory issue of some kind since the first 75 slides published properly but the last few didn't.

Does anyone have any information on this?

Stephanie Harnett

Hi David. I ended up rebooting, clearing out memory, cache and the like to ensure my system was as streamlined as possible and re-published the entire presentation again. It worked. I'm gathering it was a memory issue of some kind but odd because i wasn't using the computer at all during that time and had closed down all previously open apps before publishing. Perhaps the rule of thumb is to reboot first then publish if you are publishing a lengthy (over say 50 slide presentation with say, on average 25 objects per slide)?

Speaking of that - is there some kind of ideal ratio of number of slides in a single presentation and number of objects per slide? Some kind of bar that says if you stay in this range - things will work best? Otherwise break out into individual files and stitch together post publish?

Stephanie

David Anderson

Good question Stephanie. I don't know if there's a rule of thumb ratio. I've seen 400+slide presentations that published just fine--they took some time, but they published

The last project--real-world, client course--I worked on topped out at 125 slides with about 15 objects per slide.  It wouldn't publish on my MacBookPro (4gb memory) but published on a PC just fine.

The kinds of courses you and other power users are developing aren't typical courses. You're pushing Studio--and PowerPoint--harder than the average user. In many ways, the timing is perfect and will hopefully make future products that much better

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