Forum Discussion
Storyline: formatting notes font and background
Hi,
as many times happens, little need, big troubles. I simply want to change the font and background of the notes when they're displayed in the player layout; the need comes from a tool's trivial limitation: for the modern player, when the color scheme is set to dark, the notes background gets black but the font still stays black (it should be turned white, shouldn't it?) so you simply cannot read them.
Easy, I said, I just need to globally change the notes font color, should be easy, but it's not.
First I came across this discussion: https://community.articulate.com/series/74/articles/articulate-storyline-360-user-guide-how-to-add-slide-notes#format
It made it very easy, but I got mad before discovering that the advanced color settings menu mentioned in the post is only found in the classic player, not in the modern style; too bad, how am I supposed to be changing the notes defaults in that style? Ok, so I switched to classic layout, did the recommended steps but they don't work; so I had to switch also the player's color scheme to light, and finally the black font over the white background saved my life.
Two points: 1) please turn the font color automatically to light/white when selected color scheme is dark; 2) how can I get the font color I want by default with any player type/color scheme?
Thanks
Hello all!
Good news! In Storyline 360 (Build 3.85.31840.0), you can now instantly update the formatting of all slide notes in your project.
From here, all you need to do is update Storyline 360 in your Articulate 360 desktop app!
If you run into any issues, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Support team in a support case.
Hello Simondavide,
Thanks for bringing this up. We've seen the same problem since Update 18. Like you said, it looks like the Notes text is defaulting to black instead of white. Obviously black on black is impossible to see, so we're looking into how we can fix this.
In the meantime, you can either manually change the text color by highlighting the notes text and selecting "white", or you can switch to the Light theme.
Really sorry for the hangup. I'll keep you updated here!
Hi,
thanks for your feedback.
Maybe it's a good idea to reply to that post and explain that the mentioned menu is only available for the classic view; it took me quite a while and quite some nerves to figure it out ;-)Simone
Are there updates to this issue yet?
Greetings!
I think I've found a workaorund to address this globally. Before I imported a Power Point file into Storyline, I changed the color of the Notes font.
View > Notes Master > Highlight the type for each level in the Notes box beneath the slide and change it to the color you want it to be
When I changed the color of the font to white in Power Point, it imported into Storyline as white in the notes section in the editing view and in the Notes view in the output. This does not affect the color of your font in the notes section in the editing view in Power Point, but if you were to try and print out your slides with notes in Power Point, you wouldn't see anything in your notes section beneath the slide.
I hope this might work for others while a fix for this bug is developed.
John - so thoughtful of you to document this workaround. I'll add it to our documentation as well. We still have this issue on our radar, so we'll be sure to drop an update when we can!
?Happy to help...
Thanks so much!!!
Another year has passed since the original post. Is there any update on this? Forcing the developer to change on every slide is utterly ridiculous. Please help.
Hi Simondavide!
Here's a quick screen recording to demonstrate how to change the text to white in the Notes panel:
Hello -
Is there a way to make this change globally? I have an import from PowerPoint with 35 slides and was hoping for a global update. Because of branding, I need to use the dark background.
Thanks!
Hi Joanna,
Thanks for chiming in! I'm sorry you have to contend with this on so many slides. There isn't a way to make this change globally, so the best option is to change the color on a slide by slide basis.
I'm using a light theme player is Storyline-360. When importing PowerPoint lectures (where the notes are in black) into Stroryline, it turns the notes into white text. Having to turn the notes of every slide, one by one, to black is extremely irritating and cumbersome. I hope there is a fix for this soon!
Hello Mervin and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)
It sounds like you are running into a slightly different issue than we have reported here.
The notes text in PowerPoint is black, but changing to white when you import into Storyline 360 when using a light theme? Is this when you are using the Modern Player as well?
If you have a .ppt file for us to take a look at and import, that would be helpful.
Adjusting the text color in Powerpoint prior to importing may save you some slide by slide editing time as John shared above.
Hi Leslie
Yes, I'm using the Modern Player Light Setting.
Adjusting the color in PowerPoint before importing does not solve the problem. It imports the notes as black on white, but when you preview the slide or publish the slide show, it changes the black notes to white on white.
I've made a short demo (screen capture) to illustrate the problem and uploaded it to Articulate Review. The link is:
https://360.articulate.com/review/content/40d1161e-8e21-40ad-acdc-46a9c5c0a04e/reviewAs I'm upgrading all my courses (20+ with 20+ lectures per course) to Storyline-360, this issue is causing me huge frustration and is very time consuming to "fix".
Would appreciate it if Articulate could fix this issue.
Greetings
Mervin
Hi Mervin,
It looks like our team saw similar (black on black, when using the dark theme) so I'll let them know that you're now seeing it for white on white when using the light theme. In the meantime, you could look at editing the slide notes individually or if you change the theme from light to dark that should also reset it.
Also, I noticed that your email signature came through when you replied via email. You can remove that if you would like by clicking Edit beneath your response. Here’s a quick Peek video if you need help.
We are now seeing the black text on black background issue. It's almost two years since this was reported. Are there updated ways of fixing this?
I manually changed every slide in one 112-slide long course and I also had to manually select all of the numbered and bulleted items and change the colors for the numbers and bullets as well. It was very time consuming. We have more courses and I'm trying to avoid that pain.
