Storyline for high-dpi monitors on Windows 8.1

Jan 12, 2014

oliver O
By oliver O

I have one of those laptops with very high resolution displays.  On windows 8.1, we typically want the elements to scale up to 125% or 150% to use the new scaling features of Windows 8.1 properly, otherwise at 1080P resolution you get very very small buttons and fonts all over the operating system.

I understand that Storyline requires 96DPI to be set (100%) which is a system wide change requiring everything else on my desktop to be small just to use Storyline.  I've tried setting the "compatibilty mode" or "ignore high dPI" settings but storyline just seems to ignore that.

Has anyone at articulate looked into a possible workaround to windows 8.1 on retina displays?  With more and more monitors being extremely dense in pixels, I can't fathom changing my entire desktop resolution each and every time i need to use Storyline as all other OS windows become very tiny.

174 Replies
Eric Bybee
7 years ago01/24/17 at 6:40 pm (UTC)

Ashley, I just wanted to pop in and let you know that I finally threw in the towel trying to configure SL2 to operate in any useful way with the Microsoft Surface Book.  I decided to upgrade my MBPro and continue to use SL2 on my Windows partition using Parallels.   It is interesting to learn the Parallels Display options actually had a built in setting for "Scaling" which specifically says might improve using Windows with program that may not scale correctly in Windows 8.1 & above.  I used that setting and SL2 has never looked and worked better.  

I am finishing up a couple of projects and plan to start a trial of SL360 afterwards so I can devote the time needed to evaluate this product.  I did return the Surface.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
7 years ago01/24/17 at 11:02 pm (UTC)

Thanks Eric for the follow up and I'm sorry that you weren't able to get it to work on the Surface. I have seen a few other forums members share that the Surface is working well with Storyline 360 - so it does appear that the fixes we put in place for the high resolution monitors are doing what we thought...which is good news going forward. 

I'm with you on the Parallels set up though...fasting and best running Windows machine I've ever had is my Mac. I use VMWare to r un Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 - and even on my Thunderbolt screen it looks pretty perfect. :) 

Henrik Clausen
7 years ago02/08/17 at 9:15 am (UTC)

I was caught by surprise by this problem (bad scaling of smartshapes) while switching from Win7 to Win10 on the same monitor I've used for years, a BenQ with resolution 2560 x 1440 pixels, but found that reducing the scaling factor to 100 % fixed the issue. It's a bad fix, because I have slightly weak eyesight and would strongly prefer to use 125 % scaling for everything. This will be annoying going forward!

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
7 years ago02/08/17 at 3:11 pm (UTC)

Hey Henrik,

Just to confirm are you still using Storyline 2? It's something that is an issue that still exists there, but that we were able to get a fix in Storyline 360 and so far we've heard really good feedback from other users about how that's behaving well for them. Let us know if you're seeing something less than stellar in Storyline 360 and we'd love to have some screenshots to share with our QA team. 

ravena ramphal
7 years ago02/08/17 at 9:56 pm (UTC)

I’m in the same boat. The subscription model is not going over very well in my organization since I work for a non-profit organization. We will be sticking with Storyline 2 for a while which. It’s really too bad that there has been no effort to fix the issue in Storyline 2 since it has been reported a while ago. I’m sure there are many others experiencing the same problem.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
7 years ago02/08/17 at 10:15 pm (UTC)

Hi Ravena,

I'm sorry that this locks you into using Storyline 2 with the issues you're also seeing on high resolution monitors. I did want to let you know that when Storyline 3 is released later this year it'll have the same fix that Storyline 360 does, so you would be able to upgrade to a perpetual license of Storyline 3. Also, this forum discussion has gotten a bit long, but our team did spend a fair amount of time investigating this issue and the overall time and potential for other issues to pop up was deemed too much risk at this time. It was not a decision we made lightly knowing the broad and deep impact it would have on users such as you and your organization. 

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do to assist. 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
almost 7 years ago06/23/17 at 1:05 pm (UTC)

Hi Matthew,

With the release of Storyline 360 and Storyline 3 we included a fix for the issues seen in Storyline 2 based on the high dpi or high resolution monitors. The fix was an overhaul of the Storyline UI, so it wasn't something that could be ported back into Storyline 2.

Take a look at the trial and see how it works for your needs - and our Success team is happy to talk through the upgrade costs for loyalty customers! 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 6 years ago08/08/17 at 4:21 pm (UTC)

Hi Brian,

This thread has gotten a lot longer - so it's easy to miss Simon's response so I wanted to link back to it here. 

It was not something that our team was able to fix in Storyline 2 based on the initial way the user interface was designed and decisions made pre - Storyline's initial release. So at that point (about a year and a half ago) the team focused on ensuring that Storyline 3 and Storyline 360 would not have the same issue and we redesigned the way we handle high resolution screens and monitors. 

If you're thinking about upgrading, our Sales team is happy to talk through the options and price points that may be available to you. 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 6 years ago10/12/17 at 2:22 pm (UTC)

Hi Carly,

I'm not sure if you saw my response just before your post - it's about two months ago.

It's not something we've been able to fix in Storyline 2 - but we do understand how important it is, so our team has taken a lot of time to implement fixes in Storyline 360 and Storyline 3 as we were building them. We'll continue to look at ways to improve it there and sadly, those fixes are not something that can be ported back to Storyline 2. 

If you have any other questions or concerns, our team is happy to talk with you one on one! Reach out to us using the info here. 

ravena ramphal
over 6 years ago10/20/17 at 4:00 pm (UTC)

Hello,

I’m still experiencing the same issue with storyline 360 when using my surface on Windows 10 hooked up to a high resolution monitor. When I unplug my surface from the monitor all my text boxes seem to be resized and images are missing. This is extremely frustrating given that I was under the impression that high resolution monitors worked on SL360. Is there a preferred setting that would solve the problem?

Thanks!

Ravena Ramphal

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 6 years ago10/23/17 at 1:48 pm (UTC)

Hi Ravena,

We implemented some fixes for this in Storyline 3 and Storyline 360 - and we've got some additional elements that our team is still working on. The text boxes resizing and images going missing sounds a bit different than the issues with hi DPI that we saw on earlier versions of Storyline.

I'd like to have our team take a look at what's happening on your set up - we'd want to have either a copy of your .story file or a recording of what you're seeing when you disconnect the monitor. Can you send that along here? 

 

Leslie McKerchie
5 years ago04/08/19 at 5:04 pm (UTC)

Hello Laura and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)

As Ashley mentioned above, this is not something we were able to nail down for Storyline 2.

If you're using Storyline in Parallels Desktop on a Mac, you can avoid this behavior by disabling Retina resolution in your Windows virtual machine. 

If you're using VMware Fusion on a Mac, here's how to disable Retina resolution in your virtual machine.

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