Best practices for consistent formatting on test question pages?

Hi Barb,

I've just finished building my first course in Lectora and ran into this challenge as well. Given that I am relatively new, I may not have the best solutions but here are a few things that worked for me:

- Set your default text styles for the title (under the Design tab) to whatever you want for your questions before you import them. If you attempt to adjust the text style after importing the questions you will run into more issues with inconsistent placement and incorrect text box sizes.

- In your Design Document, set some standards for where radio buttons and text should appear. Record the x and y coordinates and the length in pixels between lines. Use the ruler tools, and go at it. Personally, I could not find a better way than adjusting every question manually to meet the standards that I wanted and eliminate quirks. One trick is that if you are not importing from CSV, you can create several question template screens and copy and reuse these templates so that you do not need to re-align the question pieces every time.

These solutions are probably a little more cumbersome than you hoped for. :S Perhaps someone will have a better solution, but personally I am finding that while Lectora has it's strengths is has some very dissapointing quirks and rough edges that Trivantis will need to address if it wants to keep up with alternatives such as articulate and Captivate.

Hope this helps!

With 200 questions, won't the cookie that stores the test answers run out of room? Or was that just an issue with Lextora X? I remember there being a character limit (was this related to IE?) causing problems with even a 50 question test if the answers were too long.

RCraig has a good suggestion about creating question templates that you can copy and paste.

What I've done for any quiz that's just utilizing the regular Lectora question types (multiple choice/select, true/false, etc.) is create a title template that has everything created except the actual test questions (i.e. an intro page, the test with a default of 10 question pages, pass/fail pages). At the bottom of the course, I just have some dummy pages (that aren't included in the test) which I created and formatted the standard Lectora question types so I can just copy a question into the test and just change the question/answer text.

Saves A LOT of time as I don't use the default Lectora formatting for the questions (the black, Arial text). I used to create each question with the wizard, then format the text style and placement of text/radio buttons manually for each question.

With a 200 question test though, the time savings might break even if you're importing a CSV. The time it takes to format each question manually, vs the time it would take to type in each question content using a preformatted question that you copy and paste might be equal depending on how fast a typer you are.