Captivate 9 Glossary Widget cutting short many descriptions

[Brett_Conlon]

Hi brains-trust,

I built a glossary that's maybe 330 entries long. But,  I found that about 60 of them have some of their 'definitions' (and I spotted one 'term') cut short, part way through them, when looking in both the Cp Preview (nxt 5 slides) or published .exe file. I accidentally discovered that all of the text is there but it is only displaying a few lines of the definition. If I use the mouse and click in the top-left corner of the definition's text then drag down the text to select it all, the missing lines appear at the bottom but then the top lines disappear (it's like looking through an invisible letterbox window).

Some background:

I'm new to Captivate (but 20+yrs Adobe software user) and have built my first serious Glossary with the built-in widget.

Luckily I did my homework and made an external xml file first (copied Cap's example code from inside the widget into a Notepad file and saved it with .xml suffix), then imported it into MS's XML Notepad to help with easily duplicating the code when copy/pasting my many entries from a Word doc. The final xml file was then imported into the Cp Glossary widget.

The length of the definition doesn't seem to make a difference. I had some short-ish def's cut off at 2 lines and other longer defs displayed no problems at 6 or so lines deep. I tried manually typing into the defs field "Test 1 Test 2 Test 3... Test 20" and it still cut off around the Test 12 mark. I put "zz" at the beginning of the all the faulty terms so I could easily find them in one place and they now show up under Z but they're still visibly cutting short. Here's an example of one of the faulty ones (It stops at "...sheets for a job or that":

<term>
    <label>Active</label>
    <def>Status posted on feeder and finisher windows that indicates that a tray is feeding or is scheduled to feed sheets for a job or that a finisher is receiving sheets or is scheduled to receive sheets.</def>
  </term>

I also thought that maybe some stray characters had found their way into the code but it looks perfectly clean in Wordpad. I then tested cutting all other entries, except for two of the faulty entries, and made another xml file. The full definitions then showed correctly when the new file was imported so perhaps the widget can't handle the large number of entries I have??? Surely not!

The faulty entries are randomly scattered throughout the xml code so there doesn't seem to be ANY pattern I can see.

Your help is MOST appreciated!

Rgds, Brett

[BDuckWorks]

In short, your problem is likely caused by "copy/pasting my many entries from a Word doc." Copying from Word inserts hidden characters that are known to choke Captivate.

You may be able to resolve this by opening the XML file in notepad, or BBedit on the Mac, saving as to a new file name and select UTF-8 encoding, not ANSI.

Worst case, copy all the text from Word to a text file (notepad, or BBedit), revert  back to the Cp Glossary sample XML file and copy and paste directly from the text file.

This issue has caused me numerous challenges, and will occur when copying and pasting from Word to captions, objects, quiz questions and /  or glossary entries!

[Brett_Conlon]

Thanks so much for responding and for your suggestions, BDuckWorks. I tried the first, which is to save out of Notepad as a UTF-8 file. I also copied/pasted the whole text into an Outlook Note (which is basic text only) and made a new file out of Notepad. Neither worked.

Before I try the last suggestion and literally spend hours rebuilding this thing, I was thinking... if there were hidden characters within these 60 references, wouldn't the two I tested on their own (removing everything but them) have continued to play up when I built a new file with only those terms/definitions in them?

And the fact that the text is actually all there in the Cp preview and Published files but the widget is only displaying a few lines... it seems like a bug.

But I'm all ears for suggestions coz at the end of the day I have a project that needs delivering soon and I don't want to have to cut these 60 definitions from the final published file.

Another annoying thing I'm finding with the widget is that you can't use the mouse scroll wheel to scroll through the listed entries. You can only drag the slider (and can't even click in the empty space to move the slider by one screen). And more annoying than that is that the first few terms and last few terms in the list can't be scrolled to when you scroll the slider all the way to the top or to the bottom - it's like the slider can't reach the very ends of your list. If you do a search for the terms, they appear, but once you scroll away from them you can't scroll back and have to search for them again. This is all quite glitchy, really!

[BDuckWorks]

In your original post, you said: "all of the text is there but it is only displaying a few lines of the definition," which I understood to mean that the Glossary widget was displaying only a few lines, and the rest is present but cut off.

I'd also replied to another post, relating to the glossary in Cp8, where the display of the widget was scrambled, for lack of a better term.

I had this problem with an earlier version of the widget.

Take a look at that thread:

https://elearning.adobe.com/discussion/2250397/#9213233

You can display the version number of the Glossary Interaction on the Properties Panel. Just click the 'Info' icon and verify that the widget version number is 17 or greater.

Also it might help us make progress, or encourage others to jump in, if you can post some screenshots of the problem.

[Brett_Conlon]

Thanks again for coming to my rescue BDuckWorks! Yes, my issue is different from the one in your linked conversation.

And, yes, pics will hopefully help. Let's try the following...

Here's how it looks when it cuts off the definition. You can see it stops at the word "that". The full definition is in my post above (remember only 60 of my 300+ definitions have this problem. Some definitions show perfectly and are many lines deeper):

Here's what happens when I place my cursor at the top left corner of the text, then drag downwards, revealing the rest of the text. So it is there, but only 2 lines of the 3 lines are showing. You can see how the top line has now disappeared:

Here's an example of how the scroll bar is all the way at the top but the top few lines for the terms list are missing (you can see them in the first screenshot above). Once you scroll down, you can never scroll fully to the top (or the bottom) again, but you can find the top terms again if you do a search for them:

I hope this helps clarify what's happening.

Ta, Brett

[Brett_Conlon]

Anyone able to provide assistance? Adobe Support, do you watch these forums and can you offer assistance?

Many thanks!

Brett

[BDuckWorks]

Sorry Brett, I missed the earlier reply...

Did you rebuild the search terms, lie 4-color and 5-color, as well as the definitions?

You might try removing those dashes, replacing with spaces and republishing.  

Unfortunately, it's difficult to tell where any special characters might be hiding, but you're fighting their existence once they are in the file. The issue you show above leads us to think the issue appears right after 'that,' but it may well be a stray character elsewhere in the text.

IMHO, that's why these widgets should be provided as source materials, as well as the published file, ready for consumption.

So, as in this case, the users of the application can work to troubleshoot issues that have been identified but are unable to be reproduced consistently or tracked down to a single cause!

[Brett_Conlon · Accepted solution]

Thanks again for your reply, BDuckWorks!

I wanted to try a few things first before I responded to you. I tried a bunch of different tests (even deleting a term or two then completely manually re-typing them in again) but nothing worked and there didn't seem to be any consistency to the issue.

Well, today I took the plunge and had an online chat session with an Adobe Support rep and after an hour's troubleshooting (I was very impressed with his thoroughness), we seem to have a working solution. It's a widget SIZING issue.

He tried it in a different size project and the full definitions showed correctly (no change to the xml file required). However, the first 2 lines are still missing when you scroll down then back to the top.

I explained that my 1280 x 800px project was our corporate standard and couldn't be changed so he said he'd go away and escalate the widget problem to a higher level.

After the support session ended, I thought I'd try changing the size of the widget in my project and found that if I reduced it by a few pixels tall and wide some of the missing pieces of the various problematic definitions began to return. So far I'm resting at 1275 x 795 (5 px shorter both ways), until I catch another cut off definition in the future and I'll then reduce it by another pixel or two. So it's a nice workaround for now and hopefully this post can help someone else in the future who's experiencing this issue.

So, last bit to fix is the missing top 2 lines.

Cheers, Brett