Variable for closing a lightbox slide?

There isn't an option to hide the X to close the lightbox. You're probably best off using a layer for this. You can dress it up so that it acts like a lightbox with a semi-transparent "shade" overlay and a framed window.

Hi EM,

As Steve mentioned you can't modify it - but you can create your own custom lightbox as described here. 

I've just worked out how to hide the X to close the lightbox, so you can then introduce your own button to close the lightbox at the appropriate point on your timeline. Removing the X involves editing the code in your .story file, but this trick removes the cross from all lightboxes in the file and therefore from ANY published files created from it.

Copy your .story file in case something goes wrong!

Rename your copied file from .story to a .zip and extract.

Navigate to story > slides and locate all the slides associated with a lightbox – both the slides that are launching lightboxes and the slides that are being lightboxed (the slide name comes near the top of the xml file so consider putting LB at the beginning of each slide name in Storyline before starting this process for ease of identification)

Look for ltBxClse= near the bottom of the .xml file of each of those slides and change the value from true to false (part of the navData class).

When you’ve altered all the necessary .xml files, select all the folders and files within the root folder and send to compressed file (don’t select the root folder itself as this will add an extra folder).

Rename the compressed file from .zip to .story

Enjoy lightboxes without the red cross and don’t forget to include a close trigger on your lightboxed slide!

Thanks again Pete for sharing and finding other applicable threads as well. It may not assist the users in this thread, since it's a bit older, but could assist someone that runs across this in the future.

Hi Pete,

I gave this a go yesterday, when I previewed the course in storyline the lightbox cross wasn't visible but when I published the course, the lightbox cross reappears, is this an issue you have come across?

Thanks

Hi Lewis,

No, I've not personally had this issue, the cross remains gone. All I can think is that one of your slides has perhaps been missed when you were changing the LtBxClse command, possibly the one that launches the lightbox? I'd go back through and double check every slide (I've noticed that sometimes the command also crops up in unrelated slides, so it could be that potentially?)

Sorry I can't be more help!

Pete

Hi Pete, I've just tested the course in Storyline 2 and your lightbox trick worked perfectly, looks like the issue is with Storyline 360! The crosses appear again when published, I'm using 360 for this particular course to overcome an issue with storyline 2 and now  I'm having an issue in 360 which isn't an issue in storyline 2, the joys!!

Thank you for getting back to me.

Oh wow! That's annoying!! We haven't switched to 360 and I'm really relieved about that now - it never occurred to me that it might work any differently if you could still change the file. I wonder why that is? I hope that's resolved before they release Storyline 3 or, even better, they could include a tick box to remove it and a colour palette to change the colour of it, and make our lives that much easier to begin with!!

Thanks for letting us know why it wasn't working - if you find a solution in 360, please stick it up here, as I'll bet there's other 360 users in the same boat!

I compared the published files and I can't see any difference, both remain as ltBxClse=false, the xml files become swf but the lightbox cross only comes back within 360. I'll dig deeper and let you know if I find anything, a fix on 360 could carry over to Storyline 3 but yes very annoying!

Unfortunately i haven't got 360 to be able to check (and I've used up my month's free trial when it first came out...), but my gut tells me that there must be a master .xml file either in the 360 .story file that doesn't exist in the SL2 .story file, or maybe it's stored in the Program Files folder on your computer. The overriding command must be sat in there, but therefore if you can find and change that it should work. Still having the command in the individual .xml files is perhaps a legacy thing to allow SL2 files to work in 360?

Hi Pete and Lewis,

There was a big rewrite to Storyline 360 (and Storyline 3 released yesterday) in regards to our publishing engine and preview based on HTML5, so items like the lightbox close and the code included could have been impacted by that. Since it's not something that our team can offer support for in terms of modifying the published output - we'll have to continue to rely on the communities assistance here. 

As for the modifications you'd like to see included in Storyline, always good ideas to share as a feature request! 

Hi, guys!

Pete, thanks a lot for your solution! I've already was looking in .xml files for this variable/function but couldn't find)

Lewis, I've made this changes in Articulate 360 and it works perfectly!

Cheers, 

Alexi

Thanks for clarifying that Alexi!

Hi Alexi,

I've not tried this for a few months now, the crosses only came back once I published the course and uploaded it to my LMS. Did the crosses remain removed when you did this?

Let me know as this was really useful in storyline 2 :)