Issues with text boxes, paragraph formatting, fonts

Oct 01, 2013

Hi there

I'm just about ready to throw in the towel on Articulate Storyline. It does wonderful things but the issues I am having with trying to correct text boxes, fonts and paragraph issues is sucking away the best years of my young life.

Firstly, when I import a PPT (PPT 2010) into Storyline (Update 3, 13052012), the fonts change sizes. This despite the fact I'm using the same computer, 100% display.

Secondly, despite the fact I set the master slides in Articulate up so that text boxes don't bloody re-size, I have to go back and fix that on every. single. slide.

I change font sizes manually when I need to, save the thing and open it and FONT SIZES CHANGE. 

As well, sometimes for no apparent reason and despite copying and pasting from notepad to strip code, Storyline decides to add random paragraph indenting.

As well, I find that bullet points seem to be too large or take on different colours.

I'm on Windows 7 Professional.

About the only thing I can think of that is happening is that I am using Cabin font http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Cabin It's an SIL open font, so I would have thought it would work. 

Could that be the issue?  HELP! 

I really love Storyline but it's getting to the point where it's costing me far too much time to use.

Thanks!

KerryJ

2 Replies
Dennis Hall

Hi Kerry:

To correct the PPT import issue, fix the issue in PPT, then import.

In PPT, you select and right click a text box, you then select the Format Shape menu item and set the Tex Box to Resize shape to fit text. Even though your PPT Master slide is set, I find PPT has issues with text boxes (even within itself). I recommend ensuring this same setup is in the regular slides of PPT before importing because I have seen PPT not respect it own Master slide settings for text boxes when they contained non-default MS Office fonts.

Another issue is when the PPT is not the same size as the story, i.e. the PPT is 25 X 15 CM, and the story is 570 X 340 px, the PPT will resize to match the story dimensions and can through things off.

For the other resizing issues, try a TTF. I use DIN for page titles in my PPT master slides and it works fine. TTF files seem to register in SL without issue.

Best Regards,

Dennis Hall

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Kerry,

In addition to the suggestions Dennis offered you, I also wanted to point out the following:

Importing from powerpoint to Storyline is not a one to one conversion, and could cause a lot of the issues you're describing. Some other things to consider when working on your Storyline projects to prevent erratic behavior are:

  • Work on your local drive (your C: drive).Working on a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, includingfile corruption, loss of audio, and other unexpected behavior. 
  • You should also make sure the directory pathto your project files and your published output is less than 260 characters(for example C:\Articulate).
  • Avoid using special characters, accents orsymbols in your file names.

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