Ian

Hi Paulvn 1. This question has cropped up frequently in the past. There is a copyright problem in distributing embedded fonts. A workaround is to use your desired font in an image editing program then save the result as a jpg. This will ensure that the font you have used is what appears on playback. 2. There is already an option to 'run full screen'. This will automatically fill the screen no matter what resolution the playback monitor is set to. Ian

I'll have a go! I've always assumed that these are required files as they're always present on any autorun CD I've come across. Ian

An excellent suggestion Ernst, and it would help point genuine newbies to the right place for Q&A's. It would need to be done soon so that the forum doesn't grow too large to organise - I guess Igor as administrator would be the one to add the sub-sections. The archived forum would probably need to be added as one complete section of historical information. Ian

In Project Options tick the "customise slideshow to music" checkbow then press the synchronisation button. Press Play to start the music and 'new transition'to trigger the next slide. If you are using v3.8 you will see the transition in the preview window. You mention that you are using several music files. I find that it is better to combine these into one file as this seems to give a more reliable exe file than using several smaller ones. Ian

You also need to have autorun.exe and autorun.ini present in the root of the CD. Autorun.inf simply tells the system to launch autorun.exe. The file you need to edit to launch your desired exe file is actually autorun.ini. Using a utility like the one mentioned above simply makes sure that all the required files are present. Ian

I think your suggestion is the only way to do this. Neat idea! Ian

Hi Re your second point - someone else has just made a similar query so have a look at the "Different Computers" thread. Its all to do with the amount of time you allow for the transition of one slide to fully appear before the next one cuts in. Ian

Hello Starfish and welcome to the forum 1. PTE is unable to include movie files within the show. Your suggestion would work, but would obviously take hours and hours to do and would be a nightmare to get synchronised. As an alternative youe could add buttons to your show that would call up the movie files and run them in whatever software the user has (Quicktime, Movie Player etc). Not as elegant as including them in the show, but a lot easier. 2. This is already possible. There is a tickbox called "Show Image" alongside the chosen picture. The default is that it it ticked, but if you untick it the image is not displayed, but any objects or sound effects will still work. 3. Not yet possible more's the pity... 4. Also not possible within the show, but a workaround could be to include two shows on the CD, one with music and one without, and give users the choice of which version to run. Ian

To reply to Tripstrilles earlier point, I still can't understand why the synchronisation is poor if you are definately using the timeline feature. Assuming you are, then the start of each transition is triggered by a fixed location in the audio track so the two things should play back consistently on different computers. The one limitation is that the speed of each transition is still governed by the processing power of the computer playing back the show. This means that if you encode a show on a fast machine and then play it back on a slow one, the dissolves will be a lot slower than you originally planned. Also, if the next picture cuts in before the previous one has finished dissolving, there is a risk that the show could loop round the previous slide until it 'catches up'. For this reason it is good practise to allow for a margin of error before fading in the next slide so that the show will work on slower machines. Did Igor respond to the PTE file you sent him? Ian

The fade transition is actually my favourite - I use it almost exclusively. The trick is to use optimised images so that the processor has less work to do. From your note it seems that you are setting the playback at 800x600, which is fine. But if your original images are larger than this then PTE will squash them down to fit your chosen display - it won't alter the original image size. Therefore it is much more efficient to size the images to your chosen resolution before making the show. If you use Photoshop 5.5 or later, use the "Save for Web" feature for your jpgs as this gives a higher quality and better compression as simply "save as jpg". Hope this helps Ian

Hello Teejit I suspect that your image sizes are too large, and this is causing the problem rather than the audio side. A 2 minute MP3 file will typically be less than 2Mb, which means you are trying to show 70Mb worth of images in two minutes. Look at the post "help with error message" in the message list. Your image sizes needn't really be more than 200k each. The larger the image the more processing resource is taken up to display it - particularly if the 'fade' transition is used. Ian

Hello Bill There were several references to this error message in the "old" forum - when the backdata becomes available a search through might solve your problem. In the meantime it could be that at a certain point your computer is simply running out of system resource. As an initial step to cure it I'd suggest using MP3 files instead of wave files. There are several free utilities (Bladebatch/BladeEncoder being one) that you could use to convert your audio files and they would be typically just 10% of their original size. I don't have a link to Bladebatch to hand but post a reply if you'd like one and I'll respond when I'm back at home. (Or more likely another forum member will beat me to it..) You haven't said what pixel dimension your images are, but if they are larger than the average screen size (eg 1024 x 768) then they are just wasting system resource. I find that by using acceptably compressed jpgs at this size the average filesize is usually about 180k. Ian

This is also true for shows made without objects. Using the same picture periodically throughout a show will not increase its overall size no matter how many times the repeated picture pops up. I guess it would make it a bit boring though Ian

Hello Tripstrilles On your "text" pictures, are you adding the text on to a blank slide in PTE or are they rasterised images that you have created in Photosop etc? If the latter, there is no reason why the auto-synch should treat them any differently to photographic images. I don't tend to use PTE's built-in text feature but I'll have a go and see if I get a similar problem. Ian PS - what's the weather like in Germany? I'm going to Berlin for a 3-day trip on Thursday and I expect its pretty cold!

I would like to be able to use the auto-synchonise facility but be able to add clickable objects. At the moment it will allow you to synchronise a show and keep the last slide on screen, but any buttons that are placed on this last slide are non-functioning. The purpose would be to have a short auto-run introduction that kicks in when a CD is loaded that has a last slide acting as a menu. The only way of achieving this at the moment is use the old method of manually timing each picture, but then of course the show won't synch on faster/slower computers. Ian

Ron - when I've used images to trigger actions the method I've used is to cut out the required image, re-size it down to a thumbnail in Photoshop and save it as a small gif file with a transparent background so that it blends in with the background image. The image quality always look fine. I'll e-mail you an example to look at. Ian

Happy to help! One thing you'll notice as the new forum builds is that there are many users from all over the world who are only too happy to share their wealth of experience with new users. When the archived "old" forum gets merged with this new one, you'll be able to search a database of 11Mb worth of Q&A on PTE and related topics, so you'd end up sending cheques to loads of people worldwide!! Regards Ian

Hi Garry You can do this from within PTE without having to use another piece of software. There are two ways of achieving what you want: 1) Make one show with all your images, then on the first image and some navigation buttons by pressing the "Object Editor" button. You will then see the Editor page - click the small "OK" button on the top left corner to add a new action button. You can drag it round the screen to position it where you want. Then right-click it, choose "properties" and you can customise the action to jump to the picture number that is the start of your next block of images. Then add more buttons to the relevent pictures as required. 2) Make several smaller shows with each block of images. Then make a show with a single slide, and add all the navigation buttons you need as per above. This time make tha action "Run application of open file" and point to the saved exe file you want the button to open. If you intend running these from a CD, delete the path that looks at your hard disk so that the button will point to the relative location on the CD you intend to make. When the show is run from a CD, the "menu" show will stay in the background as each new show is called up, so that when the launched shows exit the original menu page re-appears ready for the user to press the next button. Ian

Maybe the first one has five seconds of silence in the audio file after the music ends. If so, the best way to cure it is to open it in a wave editor like Cool Edit or Soundforge and delete the unwanted silence. Even better would be to combine both files into one so that PTE only has one audio file to load when its playing back the show. Cool Edit can be obtained from www.syntrillium.com . Other people may be able to recommend a freeware program that has similar functionality. Ian

Well its nice to see the old familiar names building up in the members list! I don't post very often (too busy at work ), but I do stop by most days to see what's being discussed. The style of the new forum is a lot slicker than the old one, and I'm looking forward to the Avatar feature being enabled so that thumbnail portraits can sit alongside the names. Ian

..... except the cartoon Avatars don't appear to work either. Ah well, c'est la vie

I also just tried to upload a 64x64 portrait as an avatar but it failed to upload any of the specified file formats. Perhaps this feature isn't yet live. When it does go live it would be nice to put faces to names! In the meantime I've chosen one of the cartoon ones available (if they work). My surname is "Bateman" so this one at least is a close fit.... Ian