Slide unable to preview on html5 in browser

[Jing Hui5EEA]

I'm a new captivate user. My project consist of importing pptx slides (company source materials) into captivate and working on them to create an elearning. I'm trying to create some form of forced navigation with a menu page (made from a blank ppt slide with objects used as buttons). Button actions are to execute a shared action. 

My issue is when I preview the project in captivate it works fine. But when I preview on html5 in browser, this menu page with my objects as button becomes a blank white page. The playbar which is set to be shown also disappears. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here. 

Appreciate if anyone can provide some guidance. 

Tom

[RodWard]

When you say you "preview the project in Captivate", to what kind of 'preview' are you referring?  If you are just talking about seeing the project slides in Edit mode in Captivate and playing along the timeline there, that is not really a proper preview of functionality because interactive objects will not pause the timeline at that point.

Using the option to Preview HTML5 in Browser is a real preview because it publishes the content and displays as HTML5 in a temporary web server environment.  So, if that is where you are seeing problems, then the most likely reason is that you have interactive objects on the timeline that are pausing the playback (possibly before some elements have properly appeared on screen). 

As for why the playbar is not apearing, if you have objects set to report to the quiz, and you have the playbar set to NOT appear during the quiz, then that would be one possible reason why the playbar is disappearing.

These are just a few ideas.  But since you mentioned that you are a new Captivate user, there is likely quite a lot about the functionality of this app that you have not as yet learned.  If you can possibly arrange to get some professional training, that might clear up a lot of questions and problems you will run into.

[Jing Hui5EEA]

To clarify, when I mentioned "preview the project in Captivate", under the preview button I select preview project. The issue I am facing now is that when previewing the project everything seems to work fine, however when I preview in HTML5 in browser there are discrepencies.

I've attached some images to give a better explanation of what I'm facing. The first image is the captivate edit mode, as the user navigates through the elearning, they will return to this page when the other options are revealed. The second image is what I see when i preview the entire project (which is how i want it to go). The last image is the preview in html5 in browser where it is completely blank. 

  

[RodWard]

Your first issue appears to me to indicate you may have a button or other interactive object on the slide and this is pausing the timeline before certain objects are due to appear.  However, I cannot see enough of the timeline layers in your screenshot to tell whether or not this is the case.   Edit mode will not show this issue up because the timeline does not pause in that view.  Check your layers and look for the pause point on any interactive objects to see whether this might be pausing the timeline before objects have had time to appear.

Another possibility is that you have some of these objects set to be Not Visible in Output (hidden) and that is why they do not appear when viewing in HTML5 in the browser.  Have you perhaps been experimenting with using Hide and Show actions to reveal objects only after the learner has performed required actions?  If so, your logic may be the reason why things aren't working as you expect.

At the end of the day there are lots of possible reasons for your 'issues'.  As you gain more experience you will get better at debugging them.  

[Jing Hui5EEA]

I managed to get over the issue by duplicating the slide and adjusting the shared action parameters to the new object names. Everything else was kept the same. Not exactly sure how that solved everything but it did. 

Nonetheless thank you for helping and giving me some place to start troubleshooting the issues. 

[Lilybiri]

If this is a non-responsive project, all preview methods except F11 (Preview HTML in Browser) use a temporary SWF output and will not show how the output will look when published to HTML. You need to check in multiple browsers as well.

As Rod points out,  there are many possible causes. In the screenshots I miss a complete view of the Timeline panel and of the shared action, triggered by the buttons, and the advanced action which you use On Enter of that slide. Those are much more relevant than the TOC or the stage view.

A typical cause could even be duplicate use of one or more names. Since you mention that the new parameters on the duplciate slide do not suffer from the problem, that pushes me at this suspicion.