Launching local content without Lectora editor

How is that different from opening the file in Lectora and pressing F11? The browser you propose would not be much lighter than Lectora itself.

The ability to preview ZIP files, or alternately to preview, then zip, would be pretty useful. (Articulate products have the latter.)

All features do not work with F11, anyway, I need to check all browsers not one that is not a standard browser.

Also, opening Lectora and then selecting a title is much, much more overhead, all we need is the code copied from the publish dialog that allows us to preview by selecting a browser.

If that's too hard then add the functionality to the Lectora editor, just add an option to open the dialog that appears after the publishing.

I think I understand what you're saying.

...what we need is the ability to launch the content locally that is intended for the internet and we need to do this without re-publishing if we run out of time.

Is there a problem with publishing to HTML and viewing the HTML files directly? They will open in a browser in the same way they will after publishing. You can choose to open in a specific broswer if you want to test its specific compatibility (though 99% of the time what works in one browser will work in any since it's all just basic HTML content).

The hardest part about this is finding the starting slide in the folder if your content doesn't have a "go to beginning" type button in its layout design, since Lectora simply publishes each slide according to its name/sub-directory structure rather than in the order it appears in your content (which makes sense since you can have a non-linear content design).

If all you need to do is be able to view the content locally/offline, seeing it just as it will appear when published online, without republishing from Lectora, then this is exactly what you're looking for.

Thanks for your input, however, what we need is the ability to launch the content locally that is intended for the internet and we need to do this without re-publishing if we run out of time.

Typically this is for testing purposes. I have over 300 titles with between 150-350 pages and 95% of these pages have Actions (simple hide/show), some pages only have a few Actions, other pages have up to 20. Every page, without exception, has an audio. Each title has between 10-15 "test your knowledge" (unscored) questions, the quizzes have a randomized question pool of 30 questions of which only 10 are selected.

I am just the Lectora Developer (programmer), not the Subject Matter Expert. To upload each title and test using all the major browsers only to find that I did not dot an "i" or cross a "t" is a major, major time drain. If I run out of time testing locally and need to start again another day it's quicker to re-publish and navigate to the page where I left off.

Again, thanks for your input.

Regards, Peter

Unless I'm missing something from the OP, this is already possible.

From within the Lectora editor, under the Publish drop-down menu, you can select "offline". In the Publish for Offline Use dialogue box, you can choose to create a zip or an executable file. Once done publishing you can access the content by running the executable. I can't tell you what it looks like when running the .exe though, because I'm behind a strict server policy that prevents .exe's from being run without an explicit verification process by the IT dept, but it appears to be a JS-based .exe which is likely the same framework ReviewLink uses to display content (i.e. it should look the same by running the .exe as in ReviewLink sans the comments window, which is the same as what it looks like in the Lectora preview mode).

You can just zip the files with the .exe as needed. Publishing directly to the .exe just skips the need to place it in the .zip file manually, it still creates an executable file you can run the content from once extracted.

The only thing I can't speak to is how it may affect any custom HTML/JS you may have in your content. I've had to re-code custom content because it would run in preview, but not via ReviewLink, but this is more a short-coming of previewing in Lectora since anything you publish is going to be hosted/viewed by external means anyway, so this should be checked for in whatever QA/QC process you (hopefully) use!