No longer able to turn off Modern Text?

Aug 11, 2021

We've been experiencing font issues on published content for several months that we finally tracked back to the recent decision by Articulate to default all new projects to have Modern Text enabled. The resolution to our font issues was supposed to be as simple as turning Modern Text off via the Fonts dropdown in the Design menu, however it now appears that option is no longer available in updated versions of Storyline. For example, I have Storyline on two different laptops, the one that hasn't been updated in several months has that option, the one downloaded Storyline to earlier this week no longer has that option. How can we disable Modern Text now? 

16 Replies
Taylor Maruca

Hello Lane, 

After looking into this, it doesn't seem that there is a way to turn off modern text in the updated versions of Storyline. That will be the default moving forward. 

Any projects that were previously created using classic text will still have that as an option. If you decided to upgrade those projects to modern text, it does save an original copy as well. This post has more details on the change. 

Good luck!

Lane Juarez

Thank you for your response Taylor, however that seems to be an unacceptable resolution as per several other reported issues the ability to turn Modern Text off is a known workaround. How are we now supposed to resolve our missing font and kerning issues if we no longer have the ability to turn this functionality off? 

Please see the following articles and advise.

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/could-turning-on-use-modern-text-be-causing-the-font-issue-that-has-plagued-storyline

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/text-missing-in-storyline-360

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/text-messed-up-when-i-preview 

Leslie McKerchie

Hello Lane, and welcome to E-Learning Heroes. 😊

I appreciate you reaching out and sharing what you are experiencing in your project file and the links to previous discussions. 

I took a look, and the issues in those threads were older and corrected.

You mention having an issue with missing font and kerning, so I wanted to share this information with you:

Learners See the Wrong Fonts or Missing Letters in HTML5 Courses

If you'd like our team to take a look, please share your project file with our support engineers to investigate. You can share it privately by uploading it here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.

Lane Juarez

I can appreciate the fact that these examples are "older/resovled" issues, however we did not start experiencing the issue with our published content until about the time that Articulate defaulted the Modern Text setting to on per your recent May 2021 post. 

https://articulate.com/support/article/Storyline-360-Modern-Text-Rendering

We did initially look at the January 2019 article that you referenced as a potential cause, however quickly determined that it did not resolve our issues for a couple of reasons.

1) The display issues were not experienced by all users on all browsers, they were sporadic and inconsistent, and they frequently resolved themselves by closing/reopening the browser.

2) Because enabling the Font Download setting in learner's browsers was not a viable option for our very diverse independent advisor audience, as they operate on a variety of networks that they may or may not have control over. 

However through extensive testing, with assistance from the "older/resovled" articles I referenced earlier, we were able to determine that turning off the Modern Text setting and reverting back to Classic Text was a viable workaround. Unfortunately just as we were about to implement that "fix" I happened to run updates to my Articulate software on one of my devices and low and behold the ability to turn that off no longer existed (went from v3.47.23871.0 to v3.5425674.0). 

I've attached a few examples of what we're experiencing and will upload a sample file to the support team as well. But honestly from what I can see Articulate has had a host of missing font and kerning issues for several years now, it's just unfortunate that we didn't start experiencing issues until a mass fix was pushed, so it seems that some additional review/testing of those changes is necessary. 

Leslie McKerchie

Hi Judy,

Thank you for reaching out and sharing that you are experiencing a similar issue.

I'd like you to share your project file with our support engineers to investigate what's happening with your permission. You can share it privately by uploading it here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.

Maria Costa-Stienstra

Hi, Judy.

Thank you for sharing the .story file!

It looks like the issue is related to your Slide Master, as changing the layout fixes the textbox issue. However, I'd like to have our support engineers confirm and help you troubleshoot.

I opened a support case on your behalf, so you should hear from our team soon via e-mail. 

Lauren Connelly

Hello Kate!

I am happy to help! I've tested your project on my end using Storyline 360 (Build 3.61.27106.0) and I am not noticing any portion of the text cut off. Here's a screen recording.

Are you seeing this behavior in Preview or in the published output? Also, which version of Storyline are you using?

Vadim Ro

We have problems with "use modern text" (usually with Hebrew texts), from SL3 and now in SL360 too. For now we can open new project in SL3, disable there "use modern text", save and close the source file and continue in SL360 (with classic text).

And if your have already project in SL360 with special SL360 features and modern text... I don't know good solution but may be some manual fix in source file can help. You can try to change parameter renderingEngineType from "DirectWrite" to "Uniscribe" in story\story.xml file.