Turn off contextual alternatives?

Hi Sally,

This is certainly a curly question and I had to read it a number of times! I know of no such setting in Storyline, or any of the Articulate suite of products...but if you've installed a custom font that has different variants, I'd look at which ones display in Powerpoint or Word to see which ones would also display within Storyline. If you can see a font within Storyline, but you still think iti's not working as expected I think we'd need to take a look at the font in question.  You can share the font files with us here or let us know where we can download it for free. If any of the information is proprietary you can reach out directly to our Support Engineers here. 

Thanks Ashley - the font appears correctly automatically in both MS Word and PowerPoint. I've attached the font file. All I know is in Adobe products, the same issue happens but there is a setting to turn off contextual alternatives on the text.

Thanks,

Sal

Hi Sally,

I certainly know what you are talking about and unfortunately at this time Storyline 2 doesn't offer any control over contextual alternatives in Open Type fonts.

One of the big updates (at least to me) from Storyline 1 to Storyline 2 was that SL2 was able to handle more of the features of Open Type fonts, ligatures specifically — SL1 ignored all of them. I'm not certain what other OT features SL2 handles or how, e.g., tabular lining numerals and old style numerals, discretionary ligatures, etc. But the bottom line is you don't have any of the control you get from Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop and I'm not aware of any way to turn off the substitutions that SL2 does automatically.

I *think* PowerPoint and Word are just Open Type dumb like SL1 was so they don't substitute in any of the automatic features built into to OT fonts. Therefore you would expect to see the base set of characters in an OT font.

Thanks Sally for sharing the font file - and thanks to Brett for sharing some additional information here about our support for certain features of OT fonts such as ligatures. I downloaded and installed the font, and it appeared for me within Windows 8.1 the same in Microsoft Word 2013, Storyline 2 and Storyline 360. So I didn't see a difference in how it would change from Word to Storyline using the standard font as it installed (noted as Augustus within each application). Do you have some images or screenshots of what you're looking at or would be expecting to see?

Thanks Brett and Ashley. Attached is a file which shows the difference.

That's a great example, Sally. Generally speaking ligatures don't interfere or dramatically change the look of a typeface, unlike some of the contextual alternatives, which are clearly demonstrated in your example. Without a way to turn them off I can see where there could be issues with clients or even personal preferences.

Ashley, do you know if Storyline defaults to using all of the contextual alternatives that an Open Type font contains? There are lots of them depending on the font and I could see where that could get to be a visual mess if all of them where applied.

Here is a list from InDesign of various Open Type attributes. Do you know which are being used in Storyline?

Well and that image doesn't even match what I saw in Storyline! I definitely didn't see any fancy curlycues... I'll confirm with our team to see what items we are using and be back in touch soon.

Ashley, you're the best. :-)

Hi Sally,

We have been able to repro the issue you reported with this font substituting alternate forms of the letters. Typically Storyline 360 does not support contextual variants. We'll have to investigate why they're being used for this particular font.

Thanks for letting us know about it!

Hey Brett,

Thanks for commenting. As far as I know Storyline 360 shouldn't be supporting any contextual alternate forms. The only things we typically support are the "normal" ligatures like fi, etc.

We'll be investigating why this is happening. Could be an issue with this OT font.

Hey Mark,

Thanks for the update. I haven't noticed any contextual alternates in the typefaces I typically use but it's good to know they aren't on by default. Having the ligatures is great, though. Love them.

Hi all - thanks so much for looking into this. Any progress on the issue?

Thanks,

Sal

Hi Sally,

Thanks for following up. It's  not something that can be done currently in Storyline 360 (or earlier version of Storyline) but it is something that we shared with our Development team in terms of a feature request. I can't offer a time frame in regards to when we'll hear back about that, but we'll keep you posted here.

Hi all,

I wanted to provide an update here, as Articulate 360 Update 3 was just released, and included a number of fixes and features which you can see in the release notes available here. The item you all may be particularly interested in is how it fixed an issue where alternate glyphs were substituted incorrectly in some fonts, such as Augustus. When you open the 360 Desktop application you’ll be prompted to  download the latest update and after downloading and installing the latest update you’ll want to republish any existing content to ensure that the updates and fixes are applied.

Let us know if you have any questions, either here or by reaching out to our Support Engineers directly.

Thank you Ashley - will this be included in Articulate Storyline too?

Thanks,

Sal

Hi Sally,

Yes, this is updated in Storyline 360 as a part of the update for the entire suite of Articulate 360 tools. 

Thanks Ashley - I'm a bit confused. There is no update available for Articulate Storyline (I'm currently on Update 11 : 1609.3020

Thanks,

Sal

Hi Sal,

This update was for Storyline 360 which is a tool in the Articulate 360 suite. The fix was not something that was ported back to Storyline 2 which is still on Update 11. 

OK thanks - we don't use Storyline 360 so keen to know if / when this issue is fixed in Storyline 2.

Thanks again,

Sal

Ah, sorry Sal - I knew a few other users mentioned Storyline 360 in this discussion so that's why it got flagged for update. We'll keep you posted if there are any changes within Storyline 2. 

Hi Ashely,

I'm taking over from Sally's role and this is still a big issue for us and is causing a lot of extra work. Have there been any updates for this in Storyline 2 since your last post? Or are there any planned?

Thanks,

Megan

Hi Megan,

Congrats on your new role! 

No changes to this in Storyline 2 since my last response. I'm really sorry that I can't say if this will be included in an update of Storyline 2 but you're in the right place to stay updated on any progress. 

It is included in Storyline 3 and Storyline 360, so in case your looking to upgrade to the latest version to take advantage of that and the other new features, our Sales team would be happy to talk through that with you! 

Thanks Ashley, I'll keep my eye on this thread. We have no plans at this stage to upgrade.

Sounds good Megan, and if anything changes just let us know!