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K
ktbCA57
Inspiring
July 30, 2006
Question

bullets won't keep their formatting after compiling

  • July 30, 2006
  • 1 reply
  • 502 views
The bullet numbers look fine in the WYSIWYG window... but after they are compiled, the bullet style changes... AND, sometimes they turn to numbers.

I can't see them as numbers in the SYSIWYG.. just in the compiled help... AND to change the back to bullets can require some doing.. I have to keep switching them back and forth between styles.. several time sometimes before they will appear as bullets in the compiled version.

the output is a chm file.

and ideas?
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1 reply

K
KC_in_Colorado
Inspiring
July 6, 2007
I just upgraded to RH Office 6.0 and am running into a similar problem since the upgrade. I have a saved style that is basically Normal + List using a custom ("blue glass") bullet. When I compile for Microsoft HTML output (.chm) all other bullets in the topic, which are NOT using that style, change to the blue glass bullets in the OUTPUT but continue to appear as square bullets in WYSIWYG.

For example, the first list in the topic uses the BlueGlass style:

* List item A
* List item B
* List Item C

Each of these items has drop-down, DHTML text. And within that DHTML text are bulleted lists that use style Normal and have bulletted list applied (from the toolbar) with square bullets selected. The black square bullets correctly appear in the WYSIWYG editor AND in the HTML code. Yet the output (.chm) uses the blue glass bullet in all lists in that topic.

I'm relatively sure this problem was not occurring before the upgrade from RoboHelp X5 to 6.0. Any advice?

Thanks!

kc
MergeThis
MergeThis
Inspiring
July 9, 2007
I'd suggest looking "under the hood" in one of these topics. Depending on how these styles were applied (as well as how they might have been applied in a pre-HTML life, such as Word), you might see that the TrueCode manifests any number of SPAN tags, each overriding the next, and not nested properly.

Then you could conduct radical surgery; that is, strip everything but the opening and closing P tags. Then, you could begin afresh.

You should probably also check the styles by opening your CSS style sheet, and checking the logic in there (by the way, any styles in the CSS will be overriden by styles contained in the HEAD section of the topic, both of which will be overriden by style info at a specific element.

Got all that?

If any of this is unclear, you might want to Attach Code the TrueCode from one LI element in a reply, in effect letting us look over your shoulder.


Good luck,
Leon
K
KC_in_Colorado
Inspiring
July 9, 2007
Thanks for replying, Leon. Actually, I did check "under the hood" at one point, and saw that all the "square" bullets were tagged as blue_glass even though they still appeared as square in WYSIWYG. So I manually changed their tags in the HTML editor (using tags from a square bullet list in another topic). I compiled and the output was back to blue_glass bullets even though the HTML tags remained as square..

This content was created in RoboHelp X5 with the WYSIWYG editor and has never been in Word. I have since rewritten the entire topic to elmininate the nested lists but I'm working with about 100 existing topics so I'm sure this is going to happen again. I'll try your suggestion for stripping out all the code down to the <P> tags and reapplying.

Not sure what to check for in the CSS. My bullets style says "Normal + list style: url[blue_glass.jpg];" I'm pretty sure I just created a bulltetted list, assigned a custom bullet character, and saved it as a new style named BulletsBlueGlass.

If I run into more problems, I will post some code. Thanks again for your suggestions!

kc
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