[Solved]Crash/hang-up on second monitor

[John Johann]

Hi,
latest HelpXplain version on Windows 10, but also in 1.7 (didn't try back any further).
My laptop (primary monitor) is connected to a 4K monitor at a different resolution.
Moving the application between screens is a bit rocky, but ignorable.
When I run HelpXplain on the primary monitor, all seems ok.
When I run on the external monitor and try, e.g., to change the background colour of a shape, I cannot access the colour picker and the application wants to restart, continue, ...
When I move the application back to the primary monitor, it seems ok again

[Tim Green]

Hi John,

I've never seen this and my own desktop setup is effectively the same as yours, but the other way round: I have a 4K primary monitor and a legacy secondary monitor, Windows 10. I use HelpXplain almost exclusively on the lower-resolution secondary monitor and never have problems. However, I also have 64GB of RAM and a graphics card with 8GB of graphics memory...

I've asked our head developer to weigh in on this, but my first thought is that it might be a memory issue: If your laptop is memory-constrained and also less powerful generally, you might be running into memory problems if you are making high-resolution Xplains with a lot of slides on your 4K monitor. However, if the problem goes away when you move from one monitor to the other without actually changing the content of your slides that also seems less likely, although the graphics memory used by the program would go down as a result of the move.

So the question is: Does this also happen with a smaller project with smaller images when you move from the 4K monitor to the legacy laptop screen? For example one created on the laptop screen, with just a couple of slides?

[John Johann]

Hi Tim,
The file where I notice it most is ca. 25MB with ~100 slides.
Testing with a new xplain seemed ok.
I use xplains to add numbering/arrows etc so that I only have to swap out the screenshots for different languages.
32GB RAM, 12GB GPU. Total memory usage stays around 35%. GPU is single-figure.
I normally only take screenshots of the primary monitor.
I seldom ever have full-screen screenshots. I use a separate program to take a screenshot of a specified section of the screen and open it in an image editor. I then copy/paste that to the xplain. The default page size in the xplain is 1920 x 1080 so that images don't get resized when pasted into the xplain.
I then reduce the page size as necessary and make any annotations, etc.
Most slides therefore have a custom size.
The strange thing is that it happens with the "Change Fill Colour" button in the ribbon. If I use the Shape Properties > Colour, it works fine.

[Tim Green]

Hi John,

If you get a bug report prompt when this happens it would be very helpful if you could send it. That would make it possible to focus in on what is actually happening here. The problem, however, will be the number of slides in your project. Currently, an Xplain is a single HTML page and ALL the content of all the slides is contained in that page. Originally, HelpXplain was not designed for projects with that many slides and we have been quite surprised to see people making them. We expected it to be used almost exclusively for relatively short HowTo sequences. What is probably happening in instances like yours is that the program thread is running out of bitmap handles or other object handles.

We are planning a structural redesign to change the way larger projects like this are handled, but that is not a short-term undertaking. What you can do now is split the project up into two or more chained Xplains. This is quite simple: You just need to insert click actions in the first and last slides of each Xplain to continue with the next Xplain.

[John Johann]

Hi,
Thanks for fixing the problem.
I'll keep the option of splitting the file in mind if I run into issues again.