Presentations no longer publishing properly

[eric_sea]

Had presentations which published properly two week ago. Source files look correct. For example a slide with an opening line of text which does not build, followed by four bullets that do build, all look normal with proper mouse clicks in audio etc. But now the opening line builds even though it does not have any animation cue and all cue points are off. The fix was to break all items into separate text boxes, then they will build properly. However, I have about 30 presentations already build that are close to being final and rebuilding all with such a hack simply is not an option.

Does anyone have any ideas? Could it have been a windows upgrade or a recent upgrade to the Java VM that caused such a problem?

I'm running PPT 2002 SP3 and Breeze Presenter 5.1.248

I am getting the same results publishing locally or publishing to our hosted breeze/acrobat account.

Thank you!

[Guest]

We are having the same issue, with the same version of Presenter. About 65% of the entrance animations (virtually all of them above "basic") have stopped working in the last two weeks. I haven't tested any of the other animation sets, but even those that are "working" are unusually choppy and out of sync.

Our IT people are troubleshooting to figure out which recent change may have caused it; I don't know if Presenter is Java based, but I'm pretty sure it works by parsing the XML file in PPT, so it may be an internet-related security update that caused it.

v/r
Marc B

[eric_sea · Accepted solution]

It seems that Adobe as applied some updates to their hosted servers and that the old version of Breeze no longer works with those updates. The fix seems to be simple. Upgrade your PPT plug in by logging into your account on admin.acrobat.com and down load the latest version of Acrobat Communicator. ( http://www.adobe.com/support/breeze/updates.html) We also complete a couple of windows updates as well as a java update as part of trying to solve this problem. I do not know if they are a necessary part of the solution, but I would recommend them.

One warning. The new Acrobat Communicator seems to process audio very differently--rather then the compression process happening early in the authoring process it now seems to happen when presentations are published. The process may also involve some changes in the compression applied. We had been working with 16bit mp3 files with good results. After completing these updates our 16bit mp3s were no longer clean. Perhaps they were compressed twice given the timing of our upgrades, but to complete the presentations we ended up reverting back to our audio source files and working with higher quality source files. The results are better--however, the ppc files are now huge! Once they are published the presentations are about the same size that they were before, but the local ppc files are dramatically larger. (if working with 32bit mono... they might be 100MB for 10 mins.

The upgrade brought all of our builds right back to where they were should have been to begin with.

If you have to work with the older version--a temporary work around that I discovered during the process was to brake up the blocks of text so that items that were meant to be static were not a part of animated blocks of text and that seemed to solve the problem.