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Kristen Featherstone

Love Lectora: Course Publishing With Error Check

Updated: Dec 2, 2020


One of Lectora's powerful features is its error checking of the course when you publish it.

Lectora does a publish check before doing a full publish, and this will provide you with blue and red errors.

  • Blue errors are warnings that provide information about objects that can be corrected, if needed, but won't prevent you from fully publishing the course.

  • Red errors are show-stoppers and have a direct impact on the functionality of a course, and Lectora will not let you complete a full publish until these are corrected.

Both the blue and red errors act like links; you can click on them. Lectora will show you what object is causing the issue in the Title Explorer. This makes it easier to find the problem and correct it.

The most common blue errors are:

  • An action is listed as having an unresolved destination This is mostly commonly found where you have navigation buttons at the Title level that are being inherited on all pages. These will have unresolved destinations when the previous button is on the first page of the course or the next button is on the last page of the course. When this action fires it has nowhere to go. These are easily rectified by disinheriting them from those pages. You can do this in the Inherit setting under the Page properties.

  • A resource is listed as being a certain size in bytes Resources are listed when they are over a certain size. This informs you in case you need to optimise it for your audience e.g. if there are bandwidth restrictions in place.

  • Resources are listed as being included in the title but not used This happens where an image, for example, was added to a page but then deleted and not used anywhere else in the Title. This means that it is still in the images folder when the course is published and taking up space when it is not needed. You can remove these objects by going to the Resources Manager under Tools. In here you will find a tab called Unused, which will show you all the objects that are not being used in the course but which will still be added to the published files. These can be removed using the options under that tab.

  • Variables are listed as being included in the title but not used This is exactly the same issue as above, but applies to variables that have been setup but are not being used. You can remove these by going to the Variables Manager under Tools. Go to the Unused tab and click either Remove or Remove All. You may also find variables that you want to delete under the User-defined tab. Variables can only be deleted if they are not being used and are not linked to any object in the Variables Used section. This section provides you with useful information as to where each variable is being used, so makes it easier to delete the link to whatever object. Once the Variables Used section is empty, the variable can then be deleted.

You may also get some red errors in the Publish check, these are not usually very common but are normally self explanatory. These have to be fixed before you go on to do a full publish.

When you have corrected all the errors you can click on Check at the bottom of the publish window and Lectora will run through the Publish check again. Where you have corrected any errors they will disappear off the list.

Once the check is complete, click on Publish and Lectora will perform a full publish, which may produce more red errors. As before, these will need fixing before publishing can be completed, but are usually self explanatory and can be fixed quite easily.

If you find you can’t fix them, get in contact with us and we will be happy to help you solve your issues!

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