Published Storyline file opens to blank screen or it stops publish

May 29, 2014

Linda Herring
By Linda Herring

I have not had this problem with Storyline before.

I published my file (82 slides). When I go to View it, I get the prompt to allow the blocked content and nothing.

Or, Storyline stops publishing the file and sits there.

I broke the file in two to see if there was a particular slide or scene with a problem. At first it seemed I did find a slide in my scene 8, so I rebuilt that slide. I tried to import and had similar problems

I am working on my C drive. I followed the repair instructions. My file name is under 260 characters and follows the other conventions. It is now 2:15 am and I have been trying to fix this for 7 hours for a delivery to the client in the morning.

Previously, any of my test files for this project published fine. I can open and view previously published projects.

Now as I just built another slide from scratch, it is not publishing again. 

4 Replies
Linda Herring
almost 10 years ago06/02/14 at 6:10 am (UTC)

Hi Ashley,

Unfortunately, it's not resolved. The advice I received for SL crashing and also failing to publish properly was to create a new file and import slides one by one to see where there may be a corruption.

This is the end of a month long project.

I followed the advice, but it Storyline is very unstable. I had to totally rebuild one section.

Is there a way for someone at Articulate to look at the file and locate the problem.

This does not make Articulate look good to the client nor me.

Also, I have spent the last 48 hours trouble shooting this every which way and as I said rebuilding some of it from scratch.

Interestingly in that one, I still had SL give me big black blank screen for a second while I was creating a generic quiz with the templates. Nothing from my old file. I'm very frustrated. I've been using SL since it came out and have not experienced this level of instability.

I get big red excess, messages to "strongly save my file" just before it locks up, flashes and pops when I publish, etc. All after I think I have a clean file. This has cost me BIG.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
almost 10 years ago06/02/14 at 7:32 am (UTC)

Hi Linda, 

I see from your case that you were working on with Adrian, that he suspected the issue was related to file corruption and that is why he suggested importing into a new file (either slide by slide or by scene) to try and resolve those issues. Once a file has become corrupt there aren't any guarantees that the import will restore the whole file. As a reminder, you'll want to follow along with these guidelines to prevent unusual behavior in your Storyline file:

  • 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.

I see that you also replied in the case, and I'll follow along in that as well to see if Adrian has any other suggestions for you. 

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