Crispness of edges of fonts in Storyline?

Nov 22, 2012

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
James McLuckie

Thanks, Dan. I should have taken the time to read the previous posts properly. When I saw all of that code, I assumed there was some digging around we had to do. 

I suppose the best thing to do is to called your variable something like 1 so that you only have to leave room for %1%. 

I'll echo Rob's sentiments and urge Articulate to get a proper fix for this as soon as ...

James McLuckie

I'm already starting to find a couple of issues with the "insert variable" workaround, sadly. It seems to work best when you have a single paragraph text box and plain text. 

When I tried it out in text boxes that had a few paragraphs, different colours, bullets etc., I was seeing a variety of different issues such as the colours of bullets changing, erratic vertical alignment, and the size of text reducing.  

Martin Horibaldo

Martin Horibaldo said:

I tried your idea - with interesting results!

One the left side: normal textbox

One the right side: textbox which contains a variable

Flash Demo:

http://demo.community24.eu/story.html

HTML5 Demo:

http://demo.community24.eu/story_html5.html

=> Here the font-family attribute doesn't work
=> Solution: deactivate "font-familyinherit;" in player.css":



You are right James. I reuploaded the font-test and added bullet points and some text-animaton.

The flash-output is quite good. The HTML5 doesn't convince me.

There is, among other, a bug concerning the font-size:

"<font face="Arial" color="#000000" style="font-size:15,52px">"

I tried to change the value with Firebug. Deleting ",52" solves the problem. Of course that's not really a solution.

John Van Dreser

Richard Armitage said:

Actually this is probably a more accurate solution to rendering text on canvas:

http://blog.headspin.com/?p=464

The canvas resolution is doubled internally and then scaled 50% to show in the browser. So in Storyline, I changed the Story Size to 2047 x 1535 and then changed the 'globals.strScale = "show all"' in the published html file so the output scales to the browser size. The rendered text is sharper in both the HTML5 and Flash versions.

I wouldn't recommend doing the above method as Storyline will probably gain better font rendering and you'd end up with oversized Storyline projects. In addition, I'm not sure what the CPU performance hit is yet.


That does help the quality of the text, except when I tried it the player buttons were reduced in size. Can they be returned to "normal" size?

Richard Armitage

John Van Dreser said:

Richard Armitage said:

Actually this is probably a more accurate solution to rendering text on canvas:

http://blog.headspin.com/?p=464

The canvas resolution is doubled internally and then scaled 50% to show in the browser. So in Storyline, I changed the Story Size to 2047 x 1535 and then changed the 'globals.strScale = "show all"' in the published html file so the output scales to the browser size. The rendered text is sharper in both the HTML5 and Flash versions.

I wouldn't recommend doing the above method as Storyline will probably gain better font rendering and you'd end up with oversized Storyline projects. In addition, I'm not sure what the CPU performance hit is yet.


That does help the quality of the text, except when I tried it the player buttons were reduced in size. Can they be returned to "normal" size?


I'm afraid we use our own bespoke navigations buttons so I'm not sure if the built in player buttons can be resized.

James McLuckie

Peter Anderson said:

Really sorry to hear about the frustration, James. This issue is still under active investigation, and I'll continue to monitor it and report any updates. 


Thanks Peter. Fingers crossed!

Eric - I am unable to look at your web page, but I don't think that is the issue. 

I did a test using the same fonts on both Storyline and Studio, and they look a lot clearer on Studio. 

Phil Kalluri

Hail Heros!!

This is my first post as I learnt a lot about the Storyline from this forum and it is of great help simply because of you all. Much appreciated.

Now my question to the dev team, is this bug fixed yet? Our client is not happy with the font rendering/sharpness.

I really hope to see a fix rather than a workaround.

Thanks in advance.

Phil Kalluri

Leslie McKerchie said:

Hi Phil and welcome to E-Learning Heroes! Glad to hear that forums have been some assistance to you

This issue is actually still open and in the hands of our QA Team. I have no update to provide at this time, but I am going to make a note that another user is inquiring.


Thanks Leslie! by any chance if you can provide me an ETA, would be much appreciated.

Dan O'Neill

Yes I agree with Rob too, been waiting for this for ages now, really frustrating issue. 

Wev'e actually recently ended up going Captivate 7 as a direct result of this issue due to it having crisp text on render.  Too many clients were complaining about the fuzzy text on projects we had done in Storyline.

Really hope this gets sorted as i actually prefer authoring in Storyline.

Justin Grenier

Good Morning, Phil.

There have been no changes to Storyline's text output in Update 4.

Having said that, the more examples of the problem we can share with the Articulate Quality Assurance Team, the more likely we are to be able to identify a path forward.  Could you please share a copy of your .story project file with us, or perhaps a screenshot or two that clearly illustrates your client's complaint?  Thanks!

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