Lin Evans

Hi Ed, Actually, you can do this (complete slideshow using objects under a single slide heading). As mentioned earlier, there "may" be a problem with memory because PTE has to keep an "undo/redo" log which can fill up rather quickly with large memory objects. I found that it was necessary for me to save my work, quit PTE and reopen fairly frequently when doing this type thing. On the slideshow linked below, the last part where the Earth spins on its axis and the Moon orbits the Earth was done this way using well over a thousand images for the spinning Earth. In order to complete the programming, I had to save, exit and re-open PTE multiple times. One can tell when the memory is getting near the point of exhaustion because the mouse action becomes very sluggish. When this happens, it's time to immediately save, exit the program completely then re-open. Here's a link to the file if you want to see it: Link to file Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, Just press the down arrow beside the default \"Spread\" and you will see multiple preset templates. Choose among them or create your own custom template by changing the parameters then you can save it as a new template which will name and see in the drop-down list. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dom, I'm not sure what the problem was with the links - I could download them O.K., but the one you linked to works fine. One thing users may have issues with is setting the file permissions. Not all FTP software allows setting permissions via right click. In case someone tries this and isn't successful, you can always download the freeware FileZilla FTP software which "does" let you right click on a file located on the server and change permissions. There are two files in those included in your link (clicks.txt & ids.txt) which must have read/write permissions (666 in a Linux server). One can just right click on the file name with FileZilla and then left click on File Permissions and enter the numeric 666 to set proper permissions for these two files. The set-up is pretty simple for those with familiarity with this, but one thing to remember is that when a link is put into the Admin Panel, that link is "NOT" the one to be used for the click link to the file. Go down and read carefully the block marked "Usage" to get the proper link syntax. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jose, If I understand you correctly, I think you will be able to use this one: http://wareseeker.com/Web-Development/clic...-3.5.zip/388270 It is about $15 USD but "should" do what you want - you can try it I think for free then purchase if it meets your needs. The developer doesn't say if it is compatible with XP or Vista, but it "probably" is because it sets on the server as I understand. Also here is a free one which is a "pearl" script. If your server allows pearl scripts this should also work: http://wareseeker.com/Network-Internet/Uni....03.zip/8040791 Best regards, Lin

Hi Fred, That's sad news - I've wondered how Harry was doing but had not heard from him in some time. He will be greatly missed here. Our deepest condolences to his friends and family. Lin & Sherry

Hi Mary, Perhaps the easiest way to have an consolidated list of all the images used in a show is via the Create Backup in Zip feature. Otherwise Stu Rands (nobeefstu) created a "reporter" utility which does many things and can report a list of images, etc. If you PM Stu I'll bet he can give you more details..... Best regards, Lin

Hi Laszlo, Looks great! Best regards, Lin

Hi Eric, It could be that you don't have the DivX codec or perhaps the AVI is trying to open before it is completely downloaded. Try saving the file rather than opening it. Once it is saved then you can select the VLC media Player and then open the file with it. It "should" play just fine with the VLC Media Player even if you haven't downloaded the DivX codec. Best regards, Lin

Hi Josephm, On Project Options, Main Tab, check Synchronize Music and Slides and "do not" check Auto Spread Slides Along Music. Go to the Timeline and click on the Timed Points button then click on Arrange All Points. This should accomplish what you want... Best regards, LIn

Hi Eric, No, I mean the PTE Made Easy series I posted here: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7901 Find the link to the Button Hover AVI and click on it to view the AVI tutorial on buttons.... What I meant was are not Peter's PTE FAQ's the answer to your comment? Best regards, Lin

Hi Laszlo, I see what your problem is now. You don't need a "mask" to do the animation - in fact you really don't "wan't" to use a mask at all for this. Just use the PNG file as an object and you will not have any more problems with opacity. Since a "mask" sees white and black as transparent and opaque to the file below, using the PNG object inside a mask renders opacity depending on the colors in the sword. Skip the mask entirely and just use the PNG file and control the transparency with the opacity control and everything will work fine. Best regards, Lin

The button use was covered in an AVI I created under the Tutorials section - number 8 as I recall in the PTE Made Easy series. This tutorial covers the feature of changing the color when the mouse "hovers" over a button so that the initial color of text changes with hover then changes again when the button is clicked. If you can tell us specifically what it is that you wish to know about the buttons and a "menu" perhaps one of us can explain. Essentially, a menu consists of a background image or blank screen with buttons added for the purpose of calling an external executable file or some function. This could be another slideshow or opening email or any of the features assigned to that button. By introduce shows I'm assuming you mean to actually "run" the slideshows? If so, just create a new slideshow called "menu" and place buttons on it. Assign to each button a particular slideshow to be run. If you would like a sample I would be glad to make one for you as a template which you could use. Best regards, Lin As for repeated questions, isn't that what Peter has done??

Hi Laszlo, I understand now what you are doing. Please zip up the PTE file and post it and I'll try to see why your opacity is less than 100%. I would set the opacity for the PNG file to 100% at least for the ending few seconds of the animation to avoid the transparent appearance. Best regards, Lin

Hi Guys, Perhaps "Photoshop" isn't the best product to compare with because they have "never," in my experience, had adequate documentation. This product has had countless third party users who have written extensive books on how to use Photoshop and its myriad features. Most users are totally lost when trying to digest Photoshop with the included documentation. Adobe's documentation, unless it has vastly improved since earlier versions, is sadly lacking especially in the "how-to" department. PTE is a rather unique product in that if one does not use "any" of the PZR effects, the current version 5.6 functions very well with minimal hardware resources just as the 4.x versions did. It's when the user decides to avail themselves of pans, zooms, rotates, opacity changes, parent/child relationships, masks, etc., etc., that things can get dicy with older equipment. These features are absolutely necessary for PTE to stay competitive because younger, computer savy users who indeed do have and maintain current state-of-art equipment expect this. We older codgers who may have limited incomes and perhaps less interest in newfangled technology can often be content with just being able to do the basics. From a business perspective, there will always be a market of sorts which we older users provide, but we constitute a niche market while the mainstream market consists of a broader spectrum of users, many of whom are not content with the status quo. To remain competitive, PTE needs the new 3D features and video capabilities which is where the market is headed whether we like it or not. The computer industry is, by and large, market driven. Both business and game users want faster data access, realistic animation, high quality video and HD TV. Unfortunately, for those of us who can't afford to upgrade every couple years, this means we can't always enjoy the latest and greatest innovations. We may not be able to have large, high quality images "and" smooth, flawless, animations with all the bells and whistles. In some sense, Microsoft has forced more powerful hardware on us by creating operating systems which are genuine resource hogs to say the least. Because of this, as we eventually upgrade our equipment, we will have the resources necessary to run optimal PTE shows complete with all the bells and whistles. But to do this, we also have a larger and longer learning curve. Just because we are getting older doesn't mean we have to stop learning! I'm always reminded of our now deceased, great old forum member Ron Wilkenson (ronwil). Ron stayed on top of the technology and incorporated it with zeal in his shows. We can all learn from Ron's example. As the technology and feature set of PTE evolves, we users are faced with new challenges which we shall surely overcome with dilligence and dedication. If you really want to see frustration, try the competition's top-end software and discover what really poor documentation is truly like! I believe that the future of really good technical support will lie in the user base rather than with the developers. PTE is very close to catching the competition and perhaps surpassing them with the really important fundamentals of what drives the market. We truly need 3D object animation, the incorporation of video and a few other important features. We already have the smoothest and highest quality image reproduction available of "any" presentation slideshow product at a reasonable price and with the very best upgrade policy of all. I think we need to give the developers the freedom to unleash their creativity and let them build us the finest product of its type. We users will provide the necessary support and documentation, but to do this effectively we can't do it with every iteration and change. We need to take it in larger steps and perhaps rather than try to make a unified document, we may need to compartmentalize and perhaps create smaller, more precise user help documents which deal with individual features rather than trying to write a tome which covers everything. As Peter says, documentation takes much time and effort and it is doubly difficult for the developers because of the wide language disparity which exists among the user base. This was, and is, a tremendous issue for even huge companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, etc. They have entire divisions devoted to documentation so imagine what it is like for Wnsoft! We all have different uses and needs for PTE and we probably will never all agree on the direction the company takes with this unique product, but we can all help and support the developers and in the process reap the reward of having a truly great product. Best regards, Lin

Hi Laszlo, Though I can't see the executable (only the PNG sword), I have manipulated your file in Photoshop so that it is now a sword with PNG transparency surrounding it. I couldn't tell from the original how much transparency it actually had, but the one I have posted the link to below has 100% transparency other than the sword itself. If I understand correctly about what you wish to do, make this PNG file (link below) a child of the image, position and size the sword and you can then adjust its transparency anywhere from zero to one hundred percent. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/pngsword.png Best regards, Lin

Hi Laszlo, If you would post the image or a link to the image perhaps we can help determine the problem. PNG images, like Compuserve GIF images "can" have transparency but that is not automatic. Any image such as a tiff or bmp or jpg can be saved as a PNG image and will have no transparency. The way you get transparency is to have more than one layer with the bottom layer being transparent. Then you can erase any part of the upper image and the part that remains is the transparent bottom layer. When you erase, the "opacity" of the eraser tool used to erase determines how transparent the image or part of the image becomes. If you post your image or a link to your image and tell us which part you want to be opaque and which part you want to be transparent, one of our forum members will help. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, Whether you have two slides each set to four seconds or one slide set to eight seconds the total time remains unchanged. You said: "In a recent slideshow, I was able to create the panning of 2 identical slides so they look like one slide being panned. However, apparently that was just some luck because I can't quite reproduce this panning to be seamless......." Then you said: "I have an image that I want to have it pan from left to right. If I put this slide in only once, it would pan too fast......" Putting the slide in once and setting the timing to the total of what you had before as the total time in the two identical slides will not change the overall timing of the slideshow. What it will do is allow you to not have to worry about trying to recreate something which you did before by more or less "accident." To understand how scale keyframes works, just make a little sample show having a single slide with two keyframes and a Pan or Zoom. Set the timing to 10 seconds via Customize Slide. Run the preview and observe. Now change the slide time to 20 seconds without checking "scale keyframes" and run the preview again. The pan or zoom action will happen exactly as it did in the original so that the actual duration of time between keyframes remains identical even though the slide will stay on screen for 20 seconds. Now repeat the same but put a check in the Scale Keyframes" block and observe. The keyframes will be spread out and the pan or zoom will happen much more slowly because the animation is "scaled" to the new slide time. That's how "scale keyframes" works. So to make your pan or zoom happen more slowly, animate the pan or zoom as you wish it to look, then adjust the timing of the slide with "Scale Keyframes" checked to make it happen slower or faster. It will happen more slowly if you increase the display time for this slide and quicker if you decrease the display time. What you are trying to achieve doesn't require you to autospread slides, it only requires you to match the total music time with the total time of the slides. How you divide this time among the slides is not important except to achieve the synchronization you desire. I'm assuming your new "single" slide will occupy the exact total time as the two identical slides did before you removed one. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from using two identical slides to achieve a pan of some sort which can be done with a single slide having a longer time duration, it just makes it much more confusing to try to animate properly. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, You're making this way too hard! You have complete control over how fast a slide pans - there is no need to put the slide in two times to do what you want. Use the "Customize Slide" feature to control the individual timing for any slide. This value overrides the default value in Project Options for the particular slide you set the custom value for. Set the keyframes to make the slide do what you want it to then control how fast this happens with the time value in Customize Slide. The "Scale Keyframe in Objects (on Time Change) allows you the option of either keeping the timing between keyframes precise or spreading the change over the new timing. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, I think perhaps a misunderstanding. Setting a slide in Customize this Slide overrides any global setting so that if the slide shadow setting in Customize this Slide is set to black while the global Project Option is set to white, the slide shadow will remain black. I had no trouble getting these slide shadows to remain white. The best way is to check the Customize this Slide setting. On the slide which was located at the bottom rather than where you set it, I have no explanation - only the observation that it indeed was positioned very low. If I change the position it remains where I place it after saving the show. On your large show, I fear you have some local resource issue. This could be available RAM (try a Ctrl Alt Del and check resources available in the Task Manager) or such. Also perhaps an anti-virus program may be usurping your resources. I had no problem creating the executable for you. Click the link below to download the zipped executable. I did find one problem with the word "Bogota" and I took the liberty of rasterizing the text to PNG because it didn't fit on my screen (ran off to the right side). I suspect it's because you used a font not resident on my computer so this may change the font you selected. It's probably a good idea to rasterize any fonts which are not very common (Times Roman, etc. are common) to png rather than leave them as text because there are many differences in local computers - that way your audience will see the same fonts in the same positions as you do regardless of which font you select. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/gary/Quindio2.zip If you want to make changes and can't create the exe file, upload the altered file as you did the original and I'll be glad to save it as the exe for you. Look for RAM issues, etc., locally. It's a fairly large show and this problem of not being able to create the exe file undoubtedly is a resource issue on your system. Best regards, Lin P.S. On the issue of saving - Brian discovered a bug in Vista/XP where if you use "save" frequently and you have lots of images, photos, etc., and you do not use "save as" at least once during a session, the system will revert to the last "save as" thus causing your previous "saves" to be lost! This is a Windows bug and not a PTE bug so it is indeed "possible" that you may have run up against this issue. This happens on systems which do not have PTE even on the hard drive. The work-around is to use Save As rather than "save" on a frequent basis. This situation could be exacerbated if "auto-save" is set on in PTE so perhaps a bit of caution is advised.

Hi Gary, I'm going to look at one problem at a time. For this post, I'm only discussing shadow color. First, slides 12, 13, 15 and 16 have the shadows set to black, not white. Could you have not saved your work after setting the shadow colors? The "default" is black. If you neglected to save the file after making changes then the original shadow color would stay black. Lin

Gary, There are literally dozens of free file transfer sites on the web where you can transfer files up to a gigabyte and sometimes more. Just pick one (do a Google search for free file transfer), upload your files and put a link here. There is no need to reduce the file size, just upload the whole zipped PTE file. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, It would help greatly if you would post the zipped PTE file - it's very difficult to test this per your inquiry without the files.... You say you "have it set correctly" but without independent verification by seeing the files as you have programmed, it's difficult to do anything but guess. It sounds as if perhaps you have a problem with some program running in the background interfering, but without having the zipped PTE files it's virtually impossible to help. Best regards, Lin

Hi John, Have you encountered this problem? The reason I'm asking is that there are thousands of users of PTE and only two members have mentioned this, and of these two only one currently has this issue. Though it "may" be a bug of some sort with PTE, without others being able to reproduce it, and since it has only shown up in a tiny, tiny percentage of systems, the probabilities are much greater that it is either a user or input issue rather than a PTE issue. Do you have some reason to believe that the developers of PTE intend to move to another version without correcting existing bugs? That certainly has not been their predisposition in the past. PTE is one of the "least" buggy presentation slideshow software programs I've ever used; and I've used nearly all of the current and past major presentation slideshow software programs for many, many years. You must realize that a great number of "issues" about which people comment on this forum are not PTE bugs but rather user problems and misunderstandings. Many of these would be easily solved were users to carefully read the user guides and tutorials available for download. True "bugs" in this software are rare, and the developers generally get to the bottom of the issues quickly and efficiently. One of the nice things about PTE is that we are all beta testers and each have the opportunity to "ring out" the software before the next version is released. With the myriad operating systems, drivers, Windows bugs and other related variables, it's a wonder to this old programmer that anything works well these days. I personally believe that the PTE development crew does an incredibly good job of swatting bugs before releasing new versions and I think that most users will agree. Many of us have been using this software since its introduction, and some of us were testing it even before it became available many years ago. We believe that it represents the very finest software of its type and that the developers have been dedicated toward keeping is so. Best regards, Lin Evans

Hi Igor, Youtube playback is apparently highly variable. The first time I played the video (after allowing the entire show to completely load first), the transitions were jerky and pans were quite jerky. However, once the show had completely played, I played it back again and it was butter smooth. I have noticed this before and wonder whether there might not be caching on the local computer which allows playback from the cache upon the second play rather than from the internet? I have seen similar playback on my own shows on Youtube where initially the playback was quite jerky then upon subsequent plays it was quite smooth. The system I played it back on has a medium high-end video card (nVIdia, 8800 GT) and a fairly powerful core 2 duo Intel processor with plenty of RAM. Best regards, Lin

Hi Lennart, Create the text on the Objects and Animations screen as an Object of your slide and set the opacity to zero at the beginning of the timeline for this text. Clone this keyframe for the text and position it at the 25 second position on the timeline with opacity still set to zero. Create a new keyframe for the text beyond 25 seconds and set the opacity to 100%. The time between the second and third keyframes will determine how quickly the text fades in. The greater the time between zero opacity and 100% opacity, the slower the fade in. Best regards, Lin