Is there a way to change one colour for another wherever that colour appears throughout the entire course? As in, is there a way to change red to blue throughout ALL the slides without having to manually do it for every asset?
It depends - if it's an element controlled by your theme colors, you could change those and it would apply to any slides using that theme. For more information you'll want to review the information here on theme colors.
If it's just red that's in a number of different places (i.e. shapes and text and etc.) there isn't a find/replace specific to colors. I could see that being a cool feature request if you were updating a course for a company who just did a rebranding though or similar. I'm not sure what it would take to include that, but at least worth sharing.
There is *a way* if you're using SL2 but it's a little fragile and more than a little funky. It's also gray area for terms of service (could be interpreted as "reverse engineering") and 100% unsupported. So it's 100% at your own risk.
Super-important. Backup your original .story file.
Rename a copy of your story to .zip
Unzip the file to a folder.
Navigate to story/slides
You'll see a heap of xml files in this folder. One for each of your slides.
Opening the slide you'll see a jumble of words. If you love XML, it's beautiful. If XML scares you, it's scary. Within this jumble, you'll see nodes of stuff. Each shape is defined in XML. Within shape nodes you'll see nodes for fills and strokes. The node value below is within a fill for one of my shapes and is the hex value for a yellow color. Searching and replacing within this file will update every one of these nodes with a new color assuming that a) it's replaced with a valid value and b) you don't break anything else:)
<srgbClr val="FFC000" />
To do this through multiple files, get a program called grepWin. It's a free program that'll let you search and replace through a folder of text files.
Save the files and re-zip.
Rename to .story
It should open. If it doesn't, the file has something invalid or missing. You can replace images using this same method. I rarely use this but will attempt it if there's a global replace of an image that I know would take me longer to hand replace within SL.
Would be great to have a way to do this built into the tool.
Yeah Im basically rebranding a series of courses and I don't use the themes
as they are usually more trouble than they are worth. Perhaps I will look
into them for the next series but it would seem I have to do the colour
changes all manually for these ones. And yeah it would be a very helpful
feature. Thanks for the reply anyway.
5 Replies
Hi Sam,
It depends - if it's an element controlled by your theme colors, you could change those and it would apply to any slides using that theme. For more information you'll want to review the information here on theme colors.
If it's just red that's in a number of different places (i.e. shapes and text and etc.) there isn't a find/replace specific to colors. I could see that being a cool feature request if you were updating a course for a company who just did a rebranding though or similar. I'm not sure what it would take to include that, but at least worth sharing.
There is *a way* if you're using SL2 but it's a little fragile and more than a little funky. It's also gray area for terms of service (could be interpreted as "reverse engineering") and 100% unsupported. So it's 100% at your own risk.
<srgbClr val="FFC000" />
Would be great to have a way to do this built into the tool.
Yeah Im basically rebranding a series of courses and I don't use the themes
as they are usually more trouble than they are worth. Perhaps I will look
into them for the next series but it would seem I have to do the colour
changes all manually for these ones. And yeah it would be a very helpful
feature. Thanks for the reply anyway.
Thanks Steve for the disclaimers. :-)
No problem Sam, and definitely submit the feature request as it's something worth sharing with our team.
This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.