Rewind and callouts

HelpXplain is the exciting new animated infographics and screencast tool that integrates with Help+Manual.

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John Johann
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Rewind and callouts

Unread post by John Johann »

Hi,
I'm publishing some xplains in eWriter with previous, play/pause, and next buttons.
Sometimes when I play the xplains, pause and go back, the contents of callouts are not displayed. The white box with border they are in is displayed, but empty.
Slides usually have a duration of 1s.
The callout has a Slide Entry animation with Duration 3s, Delay 0s, and Pause 3s. The cursor has a Slide Exit animation with the recorded duration and usually no delay/pause.
If I press F5 and replay from the beginning, the text is displayed -- but that defeats the purpose.

Have I got my timings mixed up somehow, or is this something to be aware of/is there a workaround?
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Tim Green
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Re: Rewind and callouts

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi John,

Your slide duration is less than the duration defined by the elements within it. This should normally be automatically overridden, but just from a good practice perspective I'd recommend increasing it to at least the sum of the elements' durations. I'd also recommend at least an 0.5s delay for the first animation starting at the start of the slide. That will give the scripts a chance to manage everything on a rewind.

Also, what version are you running? The current build is 1.5.0 Build 1428, which you can get here:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html

Alternatively, you can also download the current stable beta of 1.6 with this link:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/download/ ... p-v160.zip
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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John Johann
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Joined: Mon Aug 21, 2017 7:35 pm

Re: Rewind and callouts

Unread post by John Johann »

Hi Tim,
Thanks for the infos.
I'd specifically reduced the slide duration as the default 4 seconds made me feel I was waiting forever.
As for increasing the value to the sum of the animations, that would mean going through 100s of slides and laboriously adding up the animations which I'm really not keen on having to do.
From the F1 help, I was under the impression that the timings (duration, pause, delay) all get automatically added and that the slide duration is essentially ignored if they take longer.

I changed the delay for the callouts in a short xplain and that seems to fix the problem. Is there a way to select all callouts in an xplain at once and up the delay?

I'm on version 1.5.0.1428.
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Tim Green
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Re: Rewind and callouts

Unread post by Tim Green »

John Johann wrote: Tue Feb 22, 2022 9:05 am I'd specifically reduced the slide duration as the default 4 seconds made me feel I was waiting forever.

You, because you already know the slides. But most likely not someone who hasn't seen them yet.
As for increasing the value to the sum of the animations, that would mean going through 100s of slides and laboriously adding up the animations which I'm really not keen on having to do.
No need to do that; as I said, it would really just be a "better practice" thing. But I hope you don't have "100s of slides" in a single Xplain. That would definitely be a problem. For long presentations we strongly recommend creating multiple Xplains and daisy-chaining them with links in the first and last slides of each. But I'm guessing you're already doing that. 8)
From the F1 help, I was under the impression that the timings (duration, pause, delay) all get automatically added and that the slide duration is essentially ignored if they take longer.
Correct.
I changed the delay for the callouts in a short xplain and that seems to fix the problem. Is there a way to select all callouts in an xplain at once and up the delay?
I'm afraid not. But you don't need to do it for all callouts, only for the first one on each slide. :)
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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John Johann
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Re: Rewind and callouts

Unread post by John Johann »

Hi Tim,
For slides that the cursor is just hushing around on without any text *I* find the 4s too long -- but you're right, the more I go through the slides, the more impatient I get :-).
I think my largest xplain at the moment has some 210 slides. Splitting it up and daisy-chaining is probably a good idea. But I need to think about some sort of static overview first so that users could jump to a specific section.

Is the publishing tool clever enough to pick up daisy chained xplains or do they need to be in the baggage?
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Tim Green
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Re: Rewind and callouts

Unread post by Tim Green »

John Johann wrote: Tue Feb 22, 2022 12:21 pm I think my largest xplain at the moment has some 210 slides.

Ouch. I'm surprised it works at all, anywhere, even directly on your computer, let alone online. :shock: I would regard 20-30 slides, possibly 50, as a maximum, really. This is probably also the reason you are getting hiccups on rewinding. You have to understand that an Xplain is a single HTML page. EVERYTHING is on that one page, and everything is loaded on opening. The animation effect is created by overlaying an additional surface with a hole in it over that page and moving the page around and scaling it in and out behind this "viewport".
Is the publishing tool clever enough to pick up daisy chained xplains or do they need to be in the baggage?
That wouldn't work, because the baggage doesn't include folders on the output. When you insert an Xplain in a Help+Manual page you just need to refer to the .xplain source file. When Help+Manual publishes the topic it compiles the Xplain on the fly and includes all the necessary files and folders in the output.

If you put daisy-chained Xplains in an HM topic you need to include the master Xplain only. You would then publish the other ones yourself in HelpXplain and upload them to their own directory on your web server, with a subfolder for each Xplain. The links between them then need to be web links to the locations on the web server. This also avoids the need to recompile all the Xplains every time you publish the HM project.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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John Johann
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Re: Rewind and callouts

Unread post by John Johann »

Interesting, I hadn't seen anything on maximum size in the help and also didn't get any warning messages from HelpXplain so had no reason to think it isn't ok. Saving takes a little while but that is ok.

The rewind hiccups also occurred in smaller ~30 slide xplains -- but the 0,5s delay seems to have solved that.

My output formats are local so it is either going to be chm or eWriter -- does daisy chaining work there and if so, how?
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Tim Green
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Re: Rewind and callouts

Unread post by Tim Green »

My output formats are local so it is either going to be chm or eWriter -- does daisy chaining work there and if so, how?
What you can do there (and actually also in WebHelp) is put the "master" Xplain in the topic where you want it to be displayed. Then create a topic without a TOC entry and put all the other Xplains in it. Then they will all be compiled and embedded and you can linke between them without a path, just with the title page of each Xplain.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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