Letter salad

Apr 26, 2018

Hi,

on some slides the text looks like the attached example.
Any idea what to do?

I've already made several tries to publish again.

Kind regards,
Wilhelm

9 Replies
Knut Jackowski

A radical version of your suggestion worked: I copied the text into a text editor. Removed the complete text field. Created a new one. Pasted the text into it and formatted it.

Interesting observation:

The jumbled text was on more than one slide. I only changed the first one. The text looks ok now on all slides.

Lauren Parker

We were having the same issue in one of our courses with an Arial font. Many of our customers were reporting "letter salad" when using IE, but it displays perfectly in Chrome and Edge. Many of our customers are federal government, so browser settings aren't easily changed, and some don't have access to Chrome or Edge. We found that Times New Roman displays without trouble in IE, so we just updated our fonts to that boring old standard to make sure everyone could see the text.

Knut Jackowski

The salated version of the file is the one shared by Wilhelm. Do you also want to take a look at the corrected version?

I think Wilhelm was already able to rule out MIME types and browser settings as the cause by being able to replicate the strange display behaviour in Edge and Firefox inside the LMS and locally. But still the article is an interesting read. I had no idea that it is possible to restrict web fonts via group policy.

After reading that and the comment from Lauren: When using fonts that are installed on the system of the person viewing the course, does it still need web fonts?
I am asking because Arial is a font that is usually installed on every Windows version and still it seems to be able to be problematic.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Knut,

I see that Wilhelm shared a PNG file, but I don't see the .story file shared here? Is it in another discussion or somewhere else that you case it? 

Even though Arial is a common font, we've seen the MIME types, restriction of web fonts, etc. cause issues especially in Internet Explorer with other common fonts. It's worth testing the .story file in another server or environment as that typically narrows it down. If you're not able to share a file with us, you could also look at uploading to Tempshare or using Amazon S3. 

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