Forum Discussion
Storyline fonts display incorrectly on server, some letters replaced with squares
Hello - I have seen this issue posted here in years past. But I am struggling to find a root cause or solution. When we publish a course, all of the text looks fine when we open it locally. Most of the time, it also looks just fine on the web server.
However, occasionally when we send it to our web admins to post on a server, the fonts will be completely different, and contain some squares where letters should be. We're using Open Sans for the courses where I have seen the problem. See attached screenshots for the most recent example.
This has happened with both Storyline 3, and Storyline 360 (enabling modern text doesn't fix it).
It seems that after a couple of days, the problem somehow fixes itself. We have also seen it suddenly be fixed when moving it to a new folder on the server (however, we can't typically do that or we risk breaking numerous web object links, shortcuts, etc).
Does anyone have any thoughts on what might cause the server to display it incorrectly sometimes, but not all the time? It becomes a major issue for me when I'm trying to send it to my higher ups for review. I work for the Army, and I would rather not send this to a General and say "don't worry, it'll probably look right in a day or 2!" If I could determine the root cause of the problem, then my hope would be that we could prevent it from happening.
Thanks in advance for any insight.
the fonts are missing
all fonts in a storyline courses are integrated in the file "html5/data/css/output.min.css"
perhaps this file is blocked or wrong cached sometimes on your web server
Thanks Jurgen. Using the developer tools on Chrome and Edge, it appears the fonts are not being blocked from loading. So there is some other conflict.
I am wondering if it may be server cache related. I've been looking at the course on different computers - some on our base's network, and some on commercial internet - and clearing browser caches to start fresh. It seems the fonts are correct on some computers now, and even differ between browsers in a few cases. On one of mine in particular, it was showing the weird font a few hours ago on all the major browsers, and now it's not. I have no real knowledge of how servers are configured, but I would have to believe it has something to do with it.
It's looking like there is nothing I can do on the developer side to fix the issue - it would just be nice to understand more about it so that I can explain it, but on the plus side, at least it seems to resolve itself in relatively short time. At least for the server we're using.
Hi Jeff,
I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing this issue! This shouldn't be happening. Are you willing to share your file with us? I'd like to test it on our end to investigate further. You can upload it here or privately in a support case. We'll delete it from our systems once troubleshooting is complete.
Let me know if you have any questions on this!
Hi Kelly,
Sorry for the delayed reply. I believe this issue is server related. About 4-5 hours after it occurred when our web team uploaded it to the server, the issue was suddenly gone on most of the computers I tested. By the next business day, it was gone completely. I think it must be related to the server cache - but it's hard to track down for sure. I'm not sure what I would be able to share with you to troubleshoot further, unless there is some indication of how the output in Articulate interacts with the server's cache - and I have no idea if that's even a thing?Hi Jeff,
Great to hear that you've narrowed down the possible cause! If you encounter the behavior again, don't hesitate to reach out to our support team by opening a case for further assistance so we can take a closer look at what's happening.
