Problems when changing story size
Jun 22, 2015
Hi everyone,
italian Storyliner here. I have been lurking this useful forum for a while, and using Storyline for few months with some good projects going on.
I have found that Storyline works pretty well in every respect, but when changing story size in an existing projects, weird and unpredictable errors slow down my workflow, even putting projects deadlines at risk.
I know that changing story size on an ongoing project is not a best practice in Storyline, but often clients do not take this in consideration. So, everytime I change the story size, outcome starts to become unpredictable.
For example, button borders on hover start to become ticker, even if the normal state remains unchanged. Furthermore, sometimes elements in slides wander outside the story, in a way that's not even consistent with changes in story size (eg a text box moves something like 700 px to the right, even if I only changed the size by a few pixels.
The annoying thing is that there seems no way to go back to normal behaviour even if I go back to the starting size. I.e. if I change the story size to 1024*768, and then go back to the standard size, the layout seems to keep this strange behaviour. Weirdest thing of all, even if I make adjustment to the layout and save my work, when i get back to it later the proportions are screwed again. Last time I published my work to Articulate Online, then when i got back to my .story file I found that the layout had totally changed without my intervention. That happens also if I, for example, save a new version of my story like, say "xxxNEWSIZE.story" and change size. When i get back to my original file, proportions are screwed even if I took this precaution.
Am I the only one experiencing this weird behaviour when changing story size? Maybe it's something that the Storyline team it's already trying to solve? Sometimes it really bothers me, because it takes a lot of extra time to adjust things, and it's a job for which you cannot charge the client, who checked and approved the published version and only asked some minor changes, or adjustments to the story size.
Sorry for the length and perhaps my not-so-good English, but I really appreciate the software and I think that's a major problem that needs to be addressed.
Let me know!
Dario
7 Replies
Hi Dario,
The English was great - so no worries there, and long posts are allowed as well.
In regards to the issues you've encountered, there will be some expected odd behavior/change to your slides if you're adjusting the story size after the fact, and as you mentioned we always recommend starting at the story size you'll plan to use.
For your set up, it sounds like some other things are going on, so I'd want to make sure that you're working on local project files as described here and then look at importing it into a new file to resolve any other odd behavior.
If you've checked into those things and the behavior persists we'll want to take a look at one of your .story files to see how it's behaving and you can share it here.
Hi Ashley, thank you very much! I'm working with local files (I do that as a generale rule), but the second step you suggest is something I've not been thinking about yet. That could be a solution to my problem, I'm going to test it as soon as I can and report it back to the community.
But let me ask you one more question, to check if I got it right: if I need to resize my story at, say, 1024*768, the best solution could be creating a new .story file with 1024*768, and then importing the slides into this new file? If I do it this way, the slides would inherit the story size from the new file, resetting any odd behaviour (apart from, of course, the need to adjust elements on the slide)? That would be great news for me! :)
I really appreciate your help!
D
Hi Dario,
It should resolve a lot of the odd behavior as long as there isn't something wrong in the original file as a whole. If you take a look at the section # 2 in this article, you'll see there are two options for how to resize slide content based on the slide size of your existing story and the one you may be importing.
I encountered a situation recently where after resizing a project (from 4:3 to 16:9) , the file would crash Storyline completely as soon as the program was opened!
In the end, I created a new file with the desired dimensions and then imported slides from the older project one at a time until I was able to isolate the one particular slide that causing all the problems.
Anyway, lesson learned - finalize the size/dimensions before starting a project!
Hi Greg! Did you have to re-create the problematic slide? Sounds like that may have been the culprit, although we do recommend setting your story size prior to building as well.
Oh yes, when I imported the slide the new file would crash too, so I did not import it and chose to recreate instead. The only thing I noticed about the slide was that it happened to be a free-form question. So beyond the usual 'problems' of having to resize/reposition elements on a slide that's been resized, I'm not exactly sure what about that interaction would have caused the issue - I'm just glad I was able to identify it relatively quickly!
Many thanks for stopping in to share an update, Greg, and if you should find you need anything more, please don't hesitate to say the word! :)
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