This chapter takes a closer look at how a course looks when previewed and published. We'll take a look at the options that are available to customize colors and controls that surround course content and the methods and formats for publishing a course.
In this chapter, we will focus on:
- Previewing projects
- Customizing the player
- Publishing
- Publishing to the web
- Publishing with tracking
- Other publishing options
- Considerations
While working through the various exercises contained in this book, you have had plenty of opportunity to use the preview feature. This is a helpful feature during the development process that allows you to view a sample of how a slide or scene is functioning without going through the publishing process. It's quick and dirty, particularly if you leverage the shortcut keys, Ctrl + F12 to preview the current slide, Shift + F12 for the current scene, and F12 for the entire project.
However helpful preview can be, there are some elements in your course that you won't be able to see while previewing. For those, you will need to publish in order to fully test functionality. Here's what can't be seen using preview:
Note
Though you can't preview a web object using the preview feature, you can see it by right-clicking on the web object placeholder in the slide and choosing Preview. This shows the web object content but not the slide functionality, so it's a partial preview.
HTML 5 content can't be previewed in Storyline. When previewing, you'll always see the Flash version. To view the HTML 5 version, publish and launch it in a supported HTML 5 browser. You can also manually locate the story_html5.html file in the root of the published output to launch the HTML 5 version. The same applies for the IOS or iPad version.