STORYLINE 360 Font resizing and aspect ratios

Mar 07, 2019

Hi,

We were experimenting with changing the storyline 360 resolution settings (we were trying to double ours to make HTML5 text pin sharp) and found something unusual:

If the aspect ratio is either 4:3 or 16:9 then font sizes scale as expected, so 10 point text in the original file doubles to 20 point when you double the resolution. But, if your project has a different aspect ratio (ours happens to be 960 x 490 pixels) then the fonts do not scale proportionally, so even though we doubled the pixels to make 1920 x 980 the 10 point text is now 26.5 point, which mucks up an awful lot of our text formatting.

Has anyone else experienced this? Any workarounds gratefully received. I'm using the current version, freshly installed this morning.

6 Replies
Nigel Kirkby

Hi Leslie,

Thanks for taking the time to investigate.

I'm not seeing anything different to you when I publish it as is.

However, if I change the story size dimensions to double their original settings (whilst maintaining the aspect ratio) and then preview I see this (and the same in the Editor):

My issue is that the font sizes are not being doubled. The 10 point becomes 26.5 point and the 48 point becomes 128 point (and bursts out of its confining box).

If you repeat the experiment with other storyline files that have the default 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios then the font sizes double (to 20 point and 96 point respectively) as expected.

We were hoping to use this technique to overcome blurriness of text in HTML5 output when viewing on large monitors, but, due to this font resizing issue, that's now not looking viable,

Can someone look into this, as to me it looks like a bug?

Nigel Kirkby

Thanks Ashley. But I don't want to keep them at 10 and 48!

I want to double the size (in pixels) of my storyline file. And I want the font sizes to double in size too (to 20pt and 96pt), so that everything looks the same, just bigger, higher resolution, so it looks better in HTML5 on big, high resolution screens.

If I do this in a storyline file that has either 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios it works perfectly. The fonts scale to exactly double their original size. Great.

If my storyline file is not a standard aspect ratio (which ours aren't), then this doesn't work as expected. Boo. The pixel dimensions double (200%) but the fonts increase by more than double (roughly 267%), and this breaks our formatting.

I used 'scale to fit' and 'maintain aspect ratio' on both 4:3, 16:9 and our own aspect ratio files.

As we want to increase the fidelity of hundreds of storyline files this is a deal-breaker for us. The fact it works perfectly with your standard aspect ratios, but not with a non-standard one, indicates to me that it may be a bug.

Alyssa Gomez

Hi Nigel,

I checked in with our Product team to find out more about how Storyline calculates font size when the slide size changes, and I found some interesting information to pass along to you.

Font size is determined as a ratio of the default slide size (720x540) to the current slide size (1920x980 in your file). 

The ratio is 2.666x in the X dimension and 1.8x in the Y dimension. Our font scaling chooses the larger of those two numbers, so that's why your font size 10 become 26.5 (fonts have discrete sizes at every half point).

This is the way Storyline was designed to handle fonts, but I know this behavior is a deal-breaker for your team. It sounds like having more control over the font size increase would be really helpful for you, so I've passed along all of your feedback to our product team as a feature request. 

Let me know if you have any other questions about this!

Nigel Kirkby

Thanks so much Alyssa for finding that out and explaining it.

I would have thought that using the ratio of original size to new size for calculating the new font sizes (particularly if maintain aspect ratio is on) would give all users much more predictable results. Hopefully your team will enable this at some point in the future.

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