Keynote (5.1) export to html issue

I have only recently tried exporting from Keynote 5.1 to html, and have experienced the same issue that several others have reported on a variety of site. The html document will not load in a browser (just a black screen with a spinning wheel). I have tried both Safari and Firefox. This seems to be a serious issue with Keynote 9 because I have used Keynote 8 to export the same slide show and it functions correctly.

Can someone from Apple respond to this issue? It is of great importance for many reasons. My reason is that this is how I load lecture presentations onto the web for students to view!

I have noticed that if I export my Keynote 5.1.1 file as a web site and upload to the server owned by the college where I work, the web site is not visible (and I get the message, "Slide couldn't be displayed") but if I upload it to a server hosted by BlueHost.com (where I have other web pages), the Keynote slides display fine (in both Safari and Firefox on a Mac).

So I don't think it has anything to do with the browser you are using but rather it depends on the server that is hosting the pages.

Uploading to a different server is not an option at our university. I suspect this a bug in the way Keynote 9 creates that html documents. Keynote 8 works perfectly.

I do not get any error message "Slide couldn't be displayed". Rather, a black screen with a spinning wheel!

I also do not think it has anything to do with the browser, it is a bug in Keynote.

Since the slides display fine when they are posted on the server hosted by BlueHost, it makes me think there is some sort of setting or something that has to be present on the server. Maybe you could talk to your IT department to see if they have some ideas. I'm going to talk to ours and I'll post what I find out in this thread.

It's too bad those files don't display on browsers on a Windows machine. Most of my students will have Windows computers. 😟

You explained how you convert the Keynote file to PDF. Rather than using the Print option, choose the Export option (under the File menu), then choose PDF.

Our IT people think there is a bug in the application related to files generated inin:

assets/player/ScriptManager.js and assets/fallback/player.js [Ajax.Request((showUrl+"/kpf.json")] They claim that the "/" before kpf.json" needs to be removed.

However, my assets/player folder does not have a file called ScriptManager and adding it did not rescue the slide show. I will also continue to investigate but still hope that Apple will step in and derive a fix!

The suggestion to use a PDF is workable but it is easier simply to use Keynote 8 and generate the html documents there!

Most likely the web server is not setup with the correct mimetype (or any mimetype) for the .json file that is part of the package. So the server isn't able to send your browser that file. I had this trouble on our server (running IIS7).

I added a mimetype for .json files (application/json) and then reloaded the page and I no longer had any errors...

Hey, I was surprised to see this show up in my mailbox, but glad to know that someone was still looking at this. Unfortunately, I do not understand what was said in ThatsUnpossible's post. Should I send this post to our IT folks and see if it makes sense to them? Or this is something that I can do on my iMac to the exported file?

Sorry I am just a regular Mac user, not a programmer.

Just encountered this problem. Seems like Baculo was on the right track as the problem seems to be that it's not finding kpf.json. I did some further investigating and found a solution that worked. Instead of just removing the "/" in "/kpf.json", I replaced this whole bit:

showUrl+"/kpf.json"

with this:

"../kpf.json"

Try that and see if it works. I didn't do any of the scriptManager stuff.

Also, this fix only seems to fix firefox and chrome browsers. IE9 still broken for me.

Thanks for reminding me of this issue. I just went back and tried again to generate a html document from a Keynote show. This time, it worked well, so one of the iWork updates must have fixed the problem! I am now running Keynote '09 version 5.1.1 (1034).

I do note that the /assets/kpf.json is the only file there now.

Your IT people are correct. That solves the problem of it not working when uploaded on servers. Verified with Keynote 5.3.

Thanks it worked for me 🙂

You may be able to solve the problem by running a local web server, without digressing through PDF / Preview or changing code.

(1) In TERMINAL, navigate to the directory where you exported the Keynote into HTML in the first place. This directory will contain an index.html file directly under it.

Thus, if the HTML export is called "keythings", after the prompt ($) in TERMINAL type "cd", as follows:

$ cd

(2) then go to a FINDER window and simply drag the directory noted above into the active line in Terminal, leaving a space between "cd" and the dragged name. Conveniently this will result in a line as follows (without requiring you to type the filepath...and make mistakes):

$ cd /Users/yourname/directoryinquestion

that will move the terminal program's active site into the directory.

(3) Then start the server as follows, again using TERMINAL:

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888 & <enter>

This will start the internal / local web server. The port-number (here 8888) could be substituted arbitrarily, as long as it doesn't go too low, where there are designated ports for other functions. So you can use 8889 etc.

(4) Go to the BROWSER (Chrome, Safari ...) and type localhost:8888. This will display the contents of index.html, which should automatically bring up the Keynote slides (though without all the extra movement, etc., you may have used), driven by the html code. This HTML can be altered with an editor in the index.html file, resaved, and that can supplement or change the effects, if you need them...using HTML itself, CSS, Javascript etc.

(5) Don't close the Terminal window until you're done with the browser representation of Keynote.

At least this works for me...I hope it is useful.