Glossary in Storyline

Aug 17, 2012

Hi All

I'm looking for a quick way to populate the Glossary in Storyline. I already have a large Glossary built. I do not really want to copy/paste each word/definition manually?

Is there a rapid way of doing this?

I'd like to have the same Glossary to appear in ALL my 11 different Story files. How do I do this? Do I build a template with the glossary built in?

best regards

Gary

25 Replies
Mark Smith

Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro said:

Thanks, Michael. Good to know this could work if a glossary had been built previously in Storyline, I was more thinking that a glossary might have been built in a separate application, and wondering if there was a way to import it.


Agreed. I'd like the ability to create a single glossary in another application (i.e. Engage) and have the option to open up the glossary from within the Glossary menu option. That way I can maintain one centralized glossary and link to it from multiple SL courses.

Then again, I suppose I could remove the Glossary menu option, and create a resource called "Glossary" under the Resources menu.

Seth Merriam

I don't know if I would call this "easy" but it is workable for the scenario of a  *single* glossary that you might wish to port from another application, or between multiple projects, and *IF* you dont have an aversion to HTML/XML editing.

Essentially what I did was:

  1. Publish a sample story with a few glossary [place-holder] terms in it 
    (note: the [place-holder] term or terms should include all the characters you expect to see in your glossary, as they need to be included in the "fonts.swf" flash file to be rendered properly... [sigh].
  2. Went looking in the published content to find the place where the glossary data was stored
  3. Edited/replaced the data once I found it. 

Turns out the glossary data is stored as an XML node in the "frame.xml" file that I found in the story_content folder of a published project. Open the "frame.mxl" file and look for the "glossary_data" node. 

Once you find it, you simply need to make your data fit that structure, EXACTLY. And, to be sure, there are some rather, um... "wonky" bits of encoded HTML code in the exported XML (e.g., "<html><p") ... I think for text formatting; No matter what their purpose, you need to have them, otherwise you will not get the glossary working. You'll find them on both sides of your content. 

Sidebar: I will try to attach the "template" I made, to use for future projects, for reference if anyone wants it, but I would suggest you publish your own, to make sure your actual version matches your project.

I already had an XML file of my existing data (i.e., wanted terms), but you can export one from many applications easily enough if you don't... and don't even necessarily need to start with one, as long as you *end* with one. 

So, with my data and that code from the "frame.xml" file (which you can hopefully see in my attached file) I produced a chunk of code that had the structure of the "glossary_data" node and my content.

Hint: there are applications that allow you to search for and modify specific tags to make this easy... you can even remove tags and leave their contents, if necessary.

After that I BACKED UP THE ORIGINAL "frame.xml" file, just in case, and then replaced the original glossary_data node with the new one I created with my actual data, and presto, new, working glossary full of terms I wanted but did not have to paste one by one.

Sadly I could not bring that back into the file, but adding a bit of XML to a published doc is easier than copying and pasting a bunch of terms over and over... 

Anyway, hope this helps someone ;)

Vadim Ro

You can edit glossary directly in Storyline source file. It is not good way, but sometimes not good way is the best possible way.

You must change the extension of source file from ".story" to ".zip" and unpack the file to some folder. There you will see (in subfolder "story") file "playerProps.xml". Glossary is there, almost on the end. Edit what you need, zip, change file extension to ".story" - and that's all.

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