Markers in scrolling panels

Jun 25, 2012

Hey,

I am facing a problem when using markers in scrolling panels: while with "normal" markers (i.e., those outside the scrolling panel) the text box containing the caption appears adjacent to the marker itself, in the case of scrolling panels the position seems to be rather ad hoc, sometimes quite far away from the marker itself. I was wondering: is it possible to set the location of the text box manually? (I have tried deselecting "Align to parent", but it seems to be aligning the text box to the scroll panel, anyway.)

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Best,

Gergely

16 Replies
Gerry Wasiluk

You can manually move the text box for the marker to various spots.  http://community.articulate.com/tutorials/products/adding-markers.aspx

Just click on the border of the marker's text box, hold the mouse button down and then move the box around the marker to the position you like.  Then re-size the text box if necessary.

Gergely Tamasi

Hey Gerry,

Many thanks for the quick answer; however, I am afraid I did not quite clearly specify my problem. I know that I can move the text box around the marker object, but what is happening in my case is that the text box gets rather far removed from the marker object itself. While it does appear within the window, it is only a mere inconvenience; however, it also tends to happen that the text box actually appears outside the window and thus the user has no way of knowing what is wrong. Please find below a screen shot illustrating the first case (i.e., when the text box appears within the player window but further from the marker).

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Gergely

Gerry Wasiluk

Hi, Gergely!

Thanks for the expo.  That helped.  I got the same thing (actually--at first, my scrolling panel was so small width-wise that I didn't see the pop-up text at all).

I'd call that a bug and I'd report it to Articulate: http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/

In the interim, you may may to look at doing this with something like a layer.  Add a hotspot or button to an appropriate spot inside your scrolling panel and have the layer overlay your text with what you want.

Rob Berry

Hi Gergely,

I ran into the same issue...what I did was:

  • Insert the marker in the scroll panel
  • Under Format | Label Styles, set the Label Fill and Label Border to "No Fill"
  • Insert a caption wherever you want (I did mine on the marker, where it usually is when not in a scroll panel), and set its default state to Hidden
  • Add a trigger to your marker to change the state of your caption to Normal on mouse hover (Note: Make sure you insert the caption outside the scroll panel, then drag/drop  it in so that it scrolls with the panel)
  • If you need to add a description or additional text, you can either add a layer with a mouse-click trigger on the marker or just repeat the same process you used to add the hidden caption.

Steppy, I know, but it's the cleanest method I've found so far. Hope this helps!

Greg Cannon

Rob Berry said:

Hi Gergely,

I ran into the same issue...what I did was:

  • Insert the marker in the scroll panel
  • Under Format | Label Styles, set the Label Fill and Label Border to "No Fill"
  • Insert a caption wherever you want (I did mine on the marker, where it usually is when not in a scroll panel), and set its default state to Hidden
  • Add a trigger to your marker to change the state of your caption to Normal on mouse hover (Note: Make sure you insert the caption outside the scroll panel, then drag/drop  it in so that it scrolls with the panel)
  • If you need to add a description or additional text, you can either add a layer with a mouse-click trigger on the marker or just repeat the same process you used to add the hidden caption.

Steppy, I know, but it's the cleanest method I've found so far. Hope this helps!


This definitely seems the easiest way of achieving a similar effect - thanks Rob. Now all we need is Articulate to allow us to add animations to state changes so we can add in the animation effect. Or perhaps just make the Markers work properly in scrolling panels?!

Rob Berry

Hi Greg,

True, Storyline doesn't yet have built-in animations for states (fingers crossed for next update!) but you can add animations to the objects in each state.

For example, in the scrolling markers post you linked above, I added a Grow/Shrink animation to the Hover state of each caption. This produces an effect very similar to the built-in marker hover.

Mel Aclaro

I found this thread after experiencing the same issue. (I see the thread started in 2012, but the issue is apparently still persisting two years later (yr 2014 - Update 5: 1401.2415).  

Unfortunately, the workarounds above didn't seem to resolve the issue for my project; I've submitted a support case for it.  

It might also be helpful to add another use case to this in case it helps the staff troubleshoot the issue.

http://dropimages.s3.amazonaws.com/scrollingpanel-marker-bug.story  

The 3-panel story file above shows 3 cases:

Panel 1: When one image is used in the scrolling panel, the marker and its label are aligned.

Panel 2: When two images are used in the scrolling panel, the marker and its label start to lose alignment.

Panel 3: It seems as more images are added in the scrolling panel, the marker and its label become way out of alignment that they're no longer visible.

Possible workaround: I'm going to try and string all the images into one image file and see if that works.

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