Problem with Formatting Text Variable

I was able to resolve this issue by changing the properties of the textbox in which I place the reference to Do not Autofit. For this solution you may also want to make the textbox to be the appropriate size for your screen/shape.

Jyldyz's solution not consistent.

Sooooo looking forward to the update here.

I'd put typography ahead of sliders & motion paths; but that's just my 2 cents ;)

Note: I will send a six pack of Tofino brew to the Articulate developer who conquers this mountain of a challenge. Yes. Six.

After further soul crushing publishing results... my offer is up to a dozen beers to the Articulate engineer or dev who fixes this.

My beautiful (and I mean beautiful) elearning project is in shambles because text variables crush the typography. You can forget about that paragraph spacing feature in SL2 when you use text variables.

THIS really needs to be fixed. Text variables are the most powerful feature in SL... But if they uglify our end product, their useless. 

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for reaching out here, and I know that this is something we've shared with our team and that you've also been in touch with our product development team through other avenues, so I'd recommend continuing to share your thoughts and experience so that they can see the difficulties you're running into here. 

Thanks Ryan. 

Any progress on this bug fix? Thanks

Hi Kelly,

There isn't a change yet in this behavior, and as I shared with Ryan earlier it's something that has been shared with our product development team and you're also welcome to share your thoughts here in the form of a feature request. 

Thanks, hope they get to it soon, it's important. In the meantime, after fiddling with it today, I was able to get the formatting to stick using these steps:

1. Click into the variable box and type one character
2. Select and format the character so that is displays the way you want the variable result to look in the final presentation (bold, size, color, etc.)
3. Place your cursor just after the formatted character
4. Hit Enter. Your variable box should now have 2 lines
3.Use your mouse (don't backspace)  to place your cursor just after the character (on the first line) and hit the backspace key to delete the character. (The second empty line should remain in the box)
4. Save

I think the app needs the formatting assigned to a character before it will retain the formatting, if that makes sense. So, what I did was provide t a formatted character, add an extra line, then delete that character from the upper line.

Hope I got the steps right. I'm curious to see if this works for anyone else. At any rate, it worked for me while trying to change/retain the formatting for a numeric variable. Hope it helps someone else.

Thanks,
Kelly Anne

Thanks for sharing those steps here Kelly Anne and I hope that they'll assist someone else struggling with the behavior. 

Unfortunately, Kelly Anne’s suggestion was of no help in my situation.  Take a look at the attached project.  The cup was a freeform figure that I added text to (which was a suggested workaround on a related thread).  The cup on the left has the typography as it should look (which I should mention was a nightmare to do).  The cup on the left looks perfect—the leading is nice and tight, and everything looks fairly centered.  But change that text to a text variable (in this case, %Cup_1%) and suddenly it scrambles up.  A pain to work with, but with some careful cursoring via the arrow keys, it’s workable.

But now the kicker—compare what you see in Storyline 2 with a slide preview, HTML output, HTML5 output, and Storyline Launcher (CD) output.  They’re all different.  (I know to expect some limitations with various output forms, but even the internal slide preview comes out wrong!)  The default value of the variable (“8¼”) should make both cups identical, but it doesn’t.  Even if this was a simple text box and not a freeform shape, these same issues would still occur.

I must agree with Ryan here—the typography tools have some serious issues that should be addressed.  Workarounds (such as multiple text boxes atop a shape) can serve in a pinch, but that’s a quick way to stifle creativity and turn a beautiful project into something mediocre.