Rulers, positioning and player demensions

Apr 28, 2014

I am new to StoryLine but have been developing for about 15 years and I am a bit of an 'old dog". That said I create all of my own templates and rarely use any predesigned features like buttons, menus, players, etc. because I always find the standard elements are provincial and boring. One of the things I do is build all my graphic elements in Photoshop including buttons. Then place my background and other items in my authoring tool.

I need to be able to position buttons and elements down to the exact pixel coordinate like I do in Lectora. I am trying to figure out how to do that in StoryLine. For example, if I want to put a next button at a specific X and Y coordidate, how do I do that since those have no relation to the coordinates of my PSD files. Especially when my base art or background for my course does not seem to be placed at X=0 and Y=0 due to the fact that the player seems to add some unknow extra pixels to the heigth and width. On top of that, I cannot seem to be able to set any useful ruler prefs to pixel units aligned to the top left corner.

3 Replies
Christine Hendrickson

Hi Brian,

I'm sure others will pop in with some more suggestions, but I wanted to share some of the information from this tutorial below:

Although it's easy to move an object on your slide by just clicking and dragging it, sometimes you might want more control over its exact position. The Position fields on the Size and Position window allow you to specify exactly where the object appears on the slide. Use the Horizontal and Vertical fields to enter a pixel value, and then use the From selectors to indicate the relative location.

I hope that helps! :)

Brian Higgins

Hey Christine,
Gosh, you are so right, thanks. Yes once something is in Storyline I can move things around by specifying the coordinates, unfortunately that is slow and a trial and error method.  So I guess I did a poor job of explaining my problem.

I am trying to rebuild an elearing title from another application (Lectora) plus I am bringing in graphics from Photoshop. When I check the locations of my graphic items In both of those apps, I get numbers (X and Y coordinates) based on an absolute x=0, y=0 in the upper left corner. I was hoping to rapidly place known items into StoryLine by using those conventional coordiinates. So I was hoping to find a preference in Storyline that would allow me to set the upper left corner to x=0, y=0. But no such luck.

I was also hoping to set the ruler units to individual pixels but as near as I can tell, Storyline only goes down to 2px units (I saw that on a sample files it devided 720 px into 360 tick marks.)

Finally, since my original post on this and after reading another tutorial, I learned how to go into the Player settings and using the advanced color options I was able to set nearly everything I needed to 100% transparency. But that still left me with a border about my background art because Storyline still leaves a space. I did a screen capture with Snagit and took that into Photoshop and learned that Storyline has added a border 19 pixels taller and wider than the base art. I guess with the assistance of a calculator I can interpolate the -360 plus the additional 19 pixels but what a pain.

Brian Higgins

Okay, I am replying to my own comment. So Articulate community, never fear,  I stepped in where you could not.

 First, like I said, I'm a Storyline Nubie. So this is a "Duh" confession, I finally figured out that I can place my objects exactly where I want/need to by just using the Position part of the Size & Position Properties for an item, then selecting "from top Left corner" which I did not see before. Bam, done.

And the added Player boarder does not matter, as Storyline ignores that. 
The ruler still cannot be repositioned with the 0,0 point at the top left, but since the Position Properties method is a more accurate placement option anyway,  the Ruler is really useless and not needed.

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