Published project unstable

Jan 30, 2014

I'm running into several issues with my published project.

  1. It looks fine on MY computer (Chrome) when running from tempshare, but not on other people's computers, even if they use Chrome.
  2. On my computer (Chrome, tempshare) I'm able to click on links to external content and slide layers that aren't working on other's computers, regardless of browser. This is our major problem.
  3. On Firefox, lightbox slides don't fit within the lightbox frame (so, you can't see the right and bottom of the lightboxed slide)
  4. Quality of graphics is much much lower when the thing is published from my client's server vs from tempshare ON CHROME. On other browsers, the graphic quality is lower regardless of whether it's published to tempshare or client's server. The graphics in question were .wmf files in Storyline. They're so blurry as to be unreadable, except on MY computer, published through tempshare, through Chrome
  5. In Safari at least, and possibly other browsers, text boxes or whatnot will suddenly appear or disappear.
  6. In Firefox and Safari, audio controls don't work properly (for example, audio will drop off mid-slide, or you'll pause the playback and the seeker bar will keep moving)

Help? Please? Most of these are unstable issues, so sometimes they happen and not other times. We're hoping to launch on Feb 10th....

The storyline file is quite large, over 140,000K. Could that be responsible? We weren't having many of these issues before we imported the audio.

I should also mention that this isn't published through an LMS, this is straight on my client's server.

8 Replies
Katie Venit

Regarding #2: this was an issue with the glossary. I set up a lightbox slide that had layers for each glossary term. Instead of using the glossary as a lightbox, I'm trying it out with just doing a jump to slide sort of thing. Hoping this will solve the problem? Would a lightbox be squirrelier on various browsers than a regular slide?

Katie Venit

Here are some more of the issues we're experiencing. Would turning off HTML5 publishing help with any of these?

1)      On some browsers, the text in the menu wraps (as I asked it to) but not in other browsers. It works in Chrome, for example, but not Firefox.

2)    Sometimes narration cuts off early butwhen the slide is refreshed we gets the entire audio.

3)    In some browsers, slide text gets cutoff at top and bottom.

Christine Hendrickson

Hi Katie,

Are you viewing the HTML5 output when you see these issues? Have you tried viewing the Flash output instead? If so, do you see the same issues with the Flash output?

When you publish your Storyline project and include HTML5, you'll see two different HTML files in your published output. One will be a story.html - this is the Flash version. The other will be story_html5.html, which is HTML5. 

Depending on which file you use to launch the project, you'll see a a different output type. I believe if this is working better for you in Chrome, you might be viewing the HTML5 content. Chrome handles HTML5 quite a bit better than the other browsers. 

Can you try testing the Flash output, by linking to the story.html file, and let me know if you see any improvement?

Also, what version of Storyline are you current running? Please make sure you're running the most recent version of Storyline. Articulate Storyline Update 5 includes bug fixes, performance improvements, and HTML5 output enhancements. Click here for details.

Thanks, Katie!

Katie Venit

Christine, et al, wanted to let you all know that we did decide to turn off the HTML5 option. (Christine, we WERE linking to the flash story file, not HTML5, so that was a good suggestion but didn't work for us).  So far, this has cleared up ALL the bugs we were experiencing. We're going to have to do more testing, but it seems to have worked.


My partial theory is that the browsers were not up to date on flash (or didn't have it at all), so the browser was accessing the HTML5 file. As for Chrome, which I know had flash, I suspect it was just experiencing some bugs related to the HTML5 option? I'm not completely sure on that. I do know that when I turned off HTML5, Firefox made me download Flash before I could view the content, which tells me that it didn't have Flash before, which means it was trying to run the HTML5 version. 

Anyway, if anyone in the future stumbles across these issues, try turning off HTML5. 

Thanks SO MUCH to everyone for their help, moral support, etc. This was a huge, high-stakes project with a very large reach, so it was extremely worrying when we ran across those issues. I've been sleeping very well since we solved the problem! 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Thanks Katie for the update and I'm glad to hear everything is working as expected. In regards to Chrome, you may also want to check what version of Flash was installed within the browser. I believe they're on a flash version 12.0.4 now, and using an earlier version may have also caused the issues. If you need anything else, please let us know! 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Amruthesh, 

I haven't heard of that font before and don't have the font installed on my system to test it - but if you're publishing the course and testing it in the intended environment I'd like to know a bit more about what you mean by not being able to make out "Bold" font? 

Also since this thread is a bit older, can you tell us what version and update of Storyline you're using? Storyline 2 is on Update 7 and Storyline 1 is on Update 10. Lastly you'll want to confirm you're viewing the output in the latest version of Chrome or other supported browsers detailed here. 

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