alrobin

Bravo, Igor! I tried out the new image editing feature, and it now works perfectly for me! Don't know how you did it, but it was great work! Many thanks to you and Aleksey, and all your team!

Phill, Welcome! Yes, compressing the images should make a major improvement to the "stuttering" problem. A rule of thumb, especially if you are giving your show to someone else to run, and don't know the capabilities of their system, is not to use images over 150 to 200 Mb. in size. (medium size images, and 50% jpeg compression). Slow dissolves (over 3 seconds) work more smoothly, too. You can of course vary these parameters to suit the situation. You will also notice more flickering on images dissolving from light to dark, or dark to light (i.e. large changes in brightness). Hope this helps!

We were there in September! And it was COLD! COLD and WET!

Hi, James, I just watched your new Alaska slideshows - they are a lot of fun! The shots of Denali reminded me of the one day we were there in 2000 - all socked-in with rain! All the best in the Azores! (you know, I don't even know where that is! )

Hi, Jen, Welcome to the PTE Forum! This is a description of one occurrence of the error and the possible circumstances causing it - could provide some hints as to why you are encountering it in your situation. Sounds like an operating system error and nothing to do with PTE specifically, or FP. How large is the .exe file? If an error occurs in one of the TList or TStrings methods, then a EListError exception is raised. This can occur in one of the following cases: There is not enough memory to expand the list. The list tried to grow beyond its maximal capacity. An attempt was made to reduce the capacity of the list below the current element count. An attempt was made to set the list count to a negative value. A non-existent element of the list was referenced. (i.e. the list index was out of bounds) An attempt was made to move an item to a position outside the list's bounds. You could try zipping the .exe file and uploading that instead. Or simply delete it from the server and upload it again. When you download the file, make sure you save it to the HD before trying to run it. Hope this helps!

Ron, Have you tried going back to the last "official" version of PTE (v. 4.20)? Also, whenever a program starts acting up like that, I often find that un-installing and re-installing fixes things. Make sure you copy your "key" file, "PTE.KEY", to a safe place first, though.

Fred, I think you will find that your hyperlinks are still there, but for some reason they seem to be resized to miniscule dots which are no longer visible, and hence useless for your purpose. I suspect that this is due to the lack of actual text characters. I use "empty" Text objects, and find the same thing occurs. You can verify that they are still there by the object count at the top left of the object editor. Another way to verify that they are still there is to add hyperlink boxes on two opposite corners of the image, save, close, reopen, and then drag a selection rectangle around the entire image in the object editor. You should see a dotted rectangle around the perimiter of the image allowing you to group the two objects together, move together, etc. I use this method to retain the relative position of objects for larger screen resolutions. Igor: Would it be possible to add a "size" function to the hyperlink and text objects, similar to that for the "buttons", but without the border around the button. Conversely, could you add a feature to the "button" object whereby the border could be removed so that the button is completely transparent? Another little glitch that I did notice is that for "hyperlink" objects, the option to not include underlining seems to be ineffective.

Chris, You also have some control over the actions of the mouse buttons. Look under Project Options / Advanced / Advanced Options.

Thanks, Ken But it's not "file associations" I'm having a problem with. I can find my way around that maze fairly well, I think. My problem is that when I click "open picture" from the new light-table, the image opens properly in Photoshop as I expect it should. But, at the same time, the PTE window closes. Windows Explorer doesn't close when I double-click a jpeg in it. I think I remember someone complaining about a year ago that PTE wasn't "keeping the focus" under some situations. Maybe the problem has something to do with this??

Hi, Ron, You are fortunate - however, in my setup, for some unknown reason, PTE closes, and I have to go back and start it up again when finished working with the image editor (PS). Would appreciate advice re some setting I am missing out on in order to keep PTE open. Harold, Drag and drop capability would be a nice touch, too, especially in a dual-monitor arrangement.

Harold, Welcome back! Good to see you active again, and be able to benefit from your valuable ideas. I support your three suggestions - they would make very useful additional features. In particular, being able to drag a slide to one's image editor would be useful, and this should not be a difficult feature to add, since there is already a menu function (right-click on the image) for doing this. However, I notice that at present, if one uses this function, PTE, itself, closes. It would be handy if there were an easier way to open an image for editing, and when finished, have it appear immediately in edited form back in PTE.

Thanks, Igor The thumbnails in the slide list open properly now when starting PTE.

Hi, Igor, The glitch where the thumbnails "blend" into each other when opening the program still persists with Beta 8. It happens only in the slide list. It only occurs on startup, and will repeat when I close the program and start again. All views. It only happens on startup - I have not been able to replicate it after I clear it by changing the size of the slide-list thumbnails, but it returns after closing the program and starting up again. Will send you my "apr.ini" file.

I agree - I find the same anomaly. Igor, it would help a lot if you could assign the space bar to only affect the play and pause function on the timeline.

Mark, It would help if you gave your "vital statistics" (operating system, processor, amount of RAM, video card, etc.) The problem may be that you are running a show synchronized to the timeline, and you have not clicked "permit control of show" in Project Options.

Does the music always stop at the same place? Is it at a break between songs? Does it stop at exactly the same place on the other pc from the cd? Don't know what the solution is, other than to combine all music in a sound editor, but if you must have random playing of the selections, this would not be a suitable solution for you. Mp3's can be tricky, especially if they are of different qualities (sample rates, etc.), and if they have copyright bits set, etc. CD's add another complexity to the problem. You might try taking each selection into a sound editor and converting each to exactly the same mp3 quality.

Igor, It just keeps getting better and better!

I suspect a computer technician would be able to trouble-shoot the problem - but it might mean temporarily substituting another video card.

So you would not be able to use "PrintScreen" if the pc is locking up. Difficult problem to trouble-shoot. Sounds almost like a video card failure or incompatibility. I would suggest you take your pc in and have it looked at by a good technician.

cc, This is not normal - sounds like either the images are too big or loaded with too many objects, or else you have an abnormally slow pc. What are the "vital statistics" for your system? When I click on the image for a full-screen preview, the image appears almost instantaneously. Pte could be having trouble finding the images, which could also indicate the need to defrag the HD.

Yes, I remember sending some emails back and forth, but I don't remember what it was about. Hope this problem didn't start right after that! Not sure what you mean by "get resized" - are you resizing in an image editor to 1020 pixels by "x" pixels? Or are you using the "fit to screen" option in "Project Options / Screen"? What is the value of "x"? It sounds like you have the horsepower in your computer to handle any type of PTE show, and even to use large images. It obviously has something to do with the use of the objects. If you want to create a special one or two slide show with objects, small sound file, etc., you could zip up the works and email it to me and I would be happy to have a look at it for you. To create a screen shot, just press the "Print Screen" key, open a new canvas in your image editor, and hit "Ctrl - V" (for Paste). You may then want to edit (crop) the image and save it as a low-quality jpeg to make it suitable (small enough) for emailing.

Thanks, Igor. Could you please add "F2" as a prompt after "Rename" in the right-click menu? I can never remember all the shortcuts!

Right-click on the image, and choose "rename".

I would love to see this feature as well. Often when viewing a show I would like to go back to a particular slide to view something I missed on the first pass (often in a slide show the images are going by too fast, anyway). As it is now, one has to start at the beginning of the show, and then look closely to see the particular detail one missed before. In my case, I am often asleep by that time, and miss it again on the second pass. So, it's start over and hope to be alert the next time, and so on. Even if there were a list of titles or file names or even just slide numbers to click on this would be a great help and I don't think it would be that difficult for Igor to build it into the program.

pushu, It's obviously something peculiar to your particular pc setup or combination of events with the slide/objects you are trying to view. Is it possible for you to try it out on another pc with a different operating system? It sounds like a memory problem, or images too large to handle. How much RAM, and what processor speed? How large are the slide files (in pixel dimensions, and in kb)? Are you using images as objects, and if so , how large are their files? Did you try selectively removing objects until it works, to try to isolate the offending objects if any? Have you tried disabling all programs running in the background (email, virus checkers, photoshop, other utilities, etc.)? Did you re-boot the pc? (power it completely off rather than "restarting"). It's difficult to trouble-shoot your problem without being able to recreate it ourselves.