Book Image

Learning Articulate Storyline

By : Stephanie Harnett
Book Image

Learning Articulate Storyline

By: Stephanie Harnett

Overview of this book

Storyline is an authoring tool packed with out-of-the-box features that don't require any special knowledge to operate. That's right; this is a programming-free zone! E-learning authoring is no longer limited to developers; the doors are now wide open for subject matter experts with their content, writers with their storyboards, and designers with their media to work in conjunction with developers to collectively create some very cool e-learning projects. "Learning Articulate Storyline" introduces the powerful and easy-to-use features that are changing the landscape of e-learning development. You will learn about the new paradigms and features that set Storyline apart from other development tools. You'll gain insight into how you can best leverage your skills and some best practices when working with Storyline. Storyline rocks! And you're about to discover why. The aim of this book is to help you bring content to life in interesting and engaging ways, customizing the learner experience, allowing for hands-on participation, and optimizing your production processes to streamline your efforts. This book will help you enhance your skills and become an accomplished e-learning author and Storyline user.You'll work on several different projects, all created from scratch by you as you work through this book. Each task focuses on a set of complementary topics to complete the project. You'll be up and running building your first project within 10 minutes of starting this book and will add content, animate it, and control object and slide behavior to complete your first project. You'll then move on to more advanced topics to incorporate media elements, quizzing, and scenarios, then conclude by publishing your projects.When you finish this book you will be able to confidently create shining examples of e-learning done the right way, and it is this skill that will set you apart from the crowd.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Articulate Storyline
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Preparing a story


When you create a new story there is one thing you need to review, and ideally adjust, before adding content to your story and this is called story size.

Story size

The default size for a story is 720 px x 540 px. This refers to the slide size, and is the same 4:3 aspect ratio and slide size as a default PowerPoint file. The project size will be larger in dimension when published, since the player (the interface that appears around the perimeter of the slides) can consume up to 260 pixels in width and 118 pixels in height.

You can adjust the story size at any time, but it's best to do this before adding content. This is because existing slide content is rescaled to fit the new slide dimensions, which could result in text appearing smaller or larger than you'd like and graphics being stretched disproportionately.

Adjusting the story size

The setting to adjust the story size and the option to control it is found under the Design tab.

You can adjust the story size from the default to any size you'd like. The 720 px x 540 px default is a 4:3 aspect ratio, while the 720 px x 405 px preset is a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. If selecting a custom size, you can decide whether or not you want to lock the aspect ratio.

There are two options that you can work with to control the result of resizing, depending on whether the new size is larger or smaller than the existing story dimensions.

When sizing a story, you have the option to scale the contents of a slide to fit proportionately within the new size. Sometimes, scaling produces undesirable results, such as stretching images. You may opt to work with non-scaling options instead. If the size of the story is larger, you can choose to scale the background only, leaving the objects on a slide unchanged. If the size is smaller, you have the option to crop content to fit within the new size.

Here are some examples of the effects sizing has on slides with content:

As you can see, it's possible to adjust story size when you have content on a slide, but it takes a little tweaking to get the right result. You'll save time by adjusting the size of your story to its final dimensions before you begin developing content.