Crispness of edges of fonts in Storyline?

Nov 22, 2012

Eric Stephan
By Eric Stephan

I am wondering if the modules that we are making with Storyline are having the fonts have edges that appear just a bit fuzzier than is normal.

Can you tell me -- if you look at the title slide of this module -- look at the black words

Evaluation for Education Programs

  and also  

Module 2 

Module is at: http://tinyurl.com/cvrep2e

Do the font edges seem fuzzy to you?   And if so, is that pretty much normal for Articulate, or can it be improved?

BTW, the chosen font is the default one called "Articulate."

Any thoughts or suggestions on that?  THANKS! --eric

137 Replies
Geert De Rycke
11 years ago11/22/12 at 4:07 am (UTC)

Hi Eric,

I looked at your presentation and didn't have any issues with "Evaluation for Education Programs" & "Module 2"

The fonts do no look any fuzzier than other ones.

You have to keep in mind, that all text are considered to be graphics in the end and they will be converted into SWF files.

This may lead to some (very little) deterioration of the crispness of your text.

There is a way around this, and that is to fool SL into believing that your text is a picture.

This can be achieved by tilting (3D rotation) your text by 1 pixel. The human eye doesn't see the difference, yet SL will then consider you text as being a picture and will threat is a suck (no conversion)...

Cheers

Geert

Sabre Training
almost 11 years ago12/12/12 at 11:36 am (UTC)

I've been searching the forum for the same issue. Although the link in this thread is no longer active, I would say there is definitely an issue with how fonts are rendered in the published file.  You can see aliasing around the edges and every font I've tested looks worse in run-time as compared to authoring mode.  It doesn't matter if it's a True Type, Open Type, or Postscript font.  They appear marginal at best in the published file, and that is unfortunate.  

I've tested fonts in Flash (CS3, AS2.0) just to see if it was doing anything that degraded the font quality.  I had the anti-aliasing setting set to Anti-alias for Readability in one text object and Anti-alias for Animation in another.  The former looked clean when published while the latter, coincidentally, degraded  to the point that it appeared remarkably similar to the fonts in my published file out of Storyline.

Something is amiss here, and the Articulate dev team should be looking into this...

Sabre Training
almost 11 years ago12/13/12 at 9:46 am (UTC)

Hello Peter,

I did open a ticket, but I thought I'd share the image here as well for anyone who's interested.  The text on the left is a straight screen capture of Storyline's authoring window and the image on the right is the published version of the buttons.  You can see the published text gets a bit bolder and the characters don't have a smooth anti-aliasing.

(sorry for inadvertently hijacking your thread, Eric)

Dan O'Neill
almost 11 years ago02/07/13 at 6:27 am (UTC)

This is a real shame.  It's frustrating as i have searched high and low for a solution to this issue and not found one.

It seems crazy since you spend loads of time making a smart module and then the client comes back and mentions the fuzzy text is an issue and you go 'really sorry but I can't fix that'.  It puts a real downer on an otherwise fine module.

I remember having this issue back when i used Adobe Captivate 4.  But there ws a cure with that, all you did was put a white text highlight behind the text and it then rendered nice and crisp.

Shame this doesn't work with SL

Peter Anderson
almost 11 years ago02/07/13 at 8:23 am (UTC)

Hi guys,

Mark T said:

I'm sorry to say, guys, I've not heard anything regarding this issue yet.


@Mark, just checked your original case and it looks like Sid was hoping to get his hands on your file. He responded to you on December 13th. If you didn't receive his email, you may want to check your spam or junk folder for something from support@articulate.com.

And @James and @Dan, if you're willing to share your files as well, we'd be happy to take a look.

This isn't a known issue, so I'm hopeful we'll be able to get this resolved for you.

Thanks!

Dan O'Neill
almost 11 years ago02/08/13 at 2:19 am (UTC)

Hi Guys,

I recieved a response to my submitted file.

For the issue with rendering of text, we have reported this to our Quality Assurance engineers, and they are already aware of this issue. They are currently reviewing this. We'll contact you again once we receive further updates from them about this issue.

So it seems that this is a known issue.  But currently there is no work around.

Hopefully this is somthing that will get resolved soon!

Dan

Dan O'Neill
almost 11 years ago02/11/13 at 1:22 am (UTC)

Just in case you guys wern't aware there is a possible work around whilst we wait for a fix, but it is really, really laborious.

You basically convert all your text to pictures.  This then renders as an image instead and the quaility is overall better.

This has obvious draw backs, like once done the text is un-editable (if done i would have 2 project versions, 1 with the original text and the other with the pictures). 

Also if you use the scaling player the image goes fuzzy when scaled during playback.

Dan

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