Presentation freezing due to graphics

May 27, 2014

Here is an issue I discovered today with a publication produced by one of my colleagues using Presenter 13 and include fairly complex graphics posted from another application. I found a workaround  for the problem but thought others might be interested in case they have the same problem. ALSO ... this seems like bug in Articulate so I hope someone in the organization can identify the issue and do a proper fix instead of my work round.

I noticed that several slides in a colleagues presentation froze when viewed online. There was no way out and also they froze in preview.
I tried various things to see what made a difference and in the end discovered that it seemed to be the graphics that were causing the issue. However in some cases the freeze occurred on the slide before the one with graphics in it. So this was confusing.
Deleting the graphics fixed the problem and it stayed fixed after I pasted back as an image. So that was a workaround and now the presentation works. 
PowerPoint graphics are innocent the real issue is with pasted graphics in some other format.  I think they were pasted from Visio but they are not in Visio format probably a window metafile format or similar.  The odd thing is that sometimes very similar graphics pasted in these formats work fine with no freezes.
I assume what happens is that some part of the Articulate rendering engine that resolves the graphics for display hangs up on graphics in this format with some specific complexity of oddity in them. It happened with several different graphics so not sure what the issue is. Also I wonder why it sometimes hangs at the start of the slide before the graphics. I can only guess the error occurs as it buffers the next slide while displaying the current slide.
4 Replies
Leslie McKerchie

Hi David and welcome to E-Learning Heroes!

Thanks for sharing your findings and thoughts. Where were/are you publishing your content to when you noticed this behavior?

If it is an issue that you believe our support team needs to look into and be made aware of, we would encourage you to package up your course and submit it to us here.

David Markwell

Thanks for your response, the freezing version is on Articulate Online at http://snomed.elearningserver.com/3460184462.

I will try to get hold of a zipped copy of the original presentation from my colleague who developed it and if so will post this to you.

Thanks David Markwell

IHTSDO Head of Implementation and Education

dma@ihtsdo.org

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