| Why does my slide text look different when I embed my tour into my web page? |
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If your slide text displays differently for a tour embedded in a web page than a tour viewed in the Tour Preview or standalone, it is likely caused by a conflict with your CSS styles. MapsAlive uses tags such as <font> to format your slide titles and descriptions. If you are using styles in the web page with your MapsAlive tour, you may be overriding the tags used by MapsAlive. For example, if you are using a style like this in your web page:
font {
font-size: small;
font-weight: normal;
color: blue;
}
it will override the <font> tags used in the slide text and it may appear too large, too small, a different color, etc.
To fix the problem, you will need to identify the CSS styles that are in conflict and either modify them so the slide text is the way you want it or define your page styles using CSS classes or ids. Using classes or ids for your own page styles will avoid conflicts with the text formatting tags and should not cause a conflict with MapsAlive CSS styles. You can see all the styles for your tour by going to Tour Preview and clicking Code Snippets. Expand the details for option 5 and read the first bullet item in the Important Notes. There is a link that lets you see the styles. |
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| Why do I see funny characters in my slide text? |
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This can occur if a) your text includes special Unicode characters (like apostrophes) and 2) you embed your tour inside your web page without using an <iframe> and 3) your web page uses a different character encoding than the one expected by MapsAlive. These special characters can be introduced if you copy/paste text from another web page, for example.
If you are using a character encoding other than UTF-8, these characters may be interpreted incorrectly resulting in strange looking characters instead (usually more than one for each special character).
To fix the problem, you can change the character encoding for your page by including
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
inside the <head> tag for your page. Alternatively, you can edit your slide text in the Tour Builder and replace the offending characters with characters you can type on your keyboard.
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| Why don't my slides appear when I mouse over a marker when viewing my tour in Firefox? |
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When viewing a tour using Firefox, sometimes a slide does not appear when you mouse over its marker. This is a bug in Firefox and/or Flash that occurs when the page with the tour is scrolled up or down. Firefox and/or Flash are not taking the scroll position into account and so the marker location is not updated. Mousing over the marker doesn't work because Flash doesn't think there is a marker there.
If you scroll the page again the problem is usually fixed. Clicking a marker also resets the locations. Another option is to display the tour as far up the page as possible to minimize the possibility of it being scrolled.
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A Save Failed message will be displayed if you enter certain character sequences in some MapsAlive text fields. Text that looks like HTML (begins with a '<' character) can cause the problem. The error occurs because of a security mechanism built into this web site to prevent what is known as script injection, a malicious technique that is sometimes used to alter the behavior of someone else's web site.
Note that when this error occurs, none of your changes are saved. If this problem is preventing you from entering text that you need to have, please contact MapsAlive technical support for assistance. |
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| Why doesn't my embedded video display? |
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When you embed a video by pasting the HTML code into your slide you should be able to see a preview of the video on the Slide Content page. If you don't see the video on the Slide Content page, in Tour Preview or in the published tour, it may be because:
- you do not have the correct plug-in or media player (Java, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, etc.) for the video format you are trying to view.
- the video may require a later version of Flash or other media player than the one currently installed.
Note: Yahoo Flash videos require Flash 9. If you do not have Flash 9 installed, you may see a black rectangle in place of the video, and generally there is no message indicating the problem. Before using Yahoo videos you should decide if this is likely to be a problem for visitors to your tour.
If you don't see the video on the Slide Content page in the Tour Builder, it is likely that it will not display outside of MapsAlive either. To determine if this is the case, you should paste the HTML code for the video into a simple .htm file and run this file in a browser. If the video does not run outside of MapsAlive, it will not play in your tour. |
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| Why don't my popup slides display when I mouse over their markers? |
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If you are seeing this behavior in an existing tour that used to work properly, the problem may occur if you have installed the latest version of Flash Player.
Adobe recently released a security update for Flash Player 9 (version 9,0,124,0) that causes some existing tours to not display slides when mousing over their markers. This is only an issue for users who install the latest version of flash. Read more about the Adobe Security Update.
If you have encountered this problem or you just want to ensure your tours function correctly with the Flash update, all you need to do is publish your tour(s) again. To publish a tour, go to My Tours and click the thumbnail or Edit button for the tour. Click Tour Preview and then click the Publish link.
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