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A
Anonymous
December 28, 2011
Question

Do you know why the <span style="color: Transparent;"> build tag is set in topics as if by magic?

  • December 28, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 4044 views

Hello,

We are using Robohelp 9 - 9.0.1.232

It happens that some topics contain the <span style="color: Transparent;"> build tag.

It seems that RH9 sets this tag by its own. We do not manage such tags.

We come upon this while viewing one of our compiled CHM files. There was a big empty space inside a paragraph.

We opened and found that the text was present. Using the HTML view, we discovered that the empty space in the CHM file corresponded to a paragraph included in the <span style="color: Transparent;"> build tag.

For example, this morning, looking at a topic of another CHM file, we found When the tool runs,. The rest of the sentence was included in a <span style="color: Transparent;"> build tag.

This is extremely annoying, as we do not know that this tag is set, until we discover it. We ar elikely to deliver doc with missing information without knowing it, until a customer complains.

Has anyone encountered this or has an idea about this? How can we prevent RH9 from setting this tag?

Thanks for your help

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    1 reply

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    December 28, 2011

    Hi there

    First, let's get a bit clearer on our terminology, shall we?

    What you are seeing is not a "Build Tag". Sure, the Span indicates a tag and it's there when you build, but a "Build Tag" is a special tag inside RoboHelp that you apply to specific content that you wish to omit from the build using a counterpart known as a "Build Expression".

    A Build Tag in RoboHelp looks like this:

    <?rh-cbt_start condition="InProgress" ?>New model coming<?rh-cbt_end ?>

    What you are reporting is an inline styling element.

    Is this a project that began life in RoboHelp 9? Or was it created in an earlier version and was upgraded along the way? Does the same thing occur with a totally new topic you create?

    Cheers... Rick

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    A
    Anonymous
    December 28, 2011

    Hi,

    First, you are right when you want to make the terminology clearer. Thank you.

    I agree, it is not a RH9 build tag.

    Is this a project that began life in RoboHelp 9? The answer is No.

    Or was it created in an earlier version and was upgraded along the way? The answer is Yes

    Does the same thing occur with a totally new topic you create? The answer is Yes. The topic with only the beginning of the sentence was created on September 2011 and I upgraded to RH9 in May.

    Cheers

    A
    Anonymous
    December 29, 2011

    Hello:

    I've been reading forum topics for a while but just newly registered today. I wanted to chime in on this discussion because this is a problem we have seen as well.

    My tech writing team is using RoboHelp 8.0.2.208. We initially noticed this problem in our generated build (WebHelp) as it displays in our company's product. In Internet Explorer, the text displays correctly (as if IE sees "transparent" but defaults to "black"), but the text looked as if it wasn't there at all in Firefox (except if I highlighted the area with my cursor). A look at the htm files showed the problem reported in this thread, where a transparent color had been assigned to the font.

    We are unsure as to why this would happen, though we've tried to discover a pattern. Occasionally, we have seen the transparent tag right after text that had been changed to a new style (bold font or a color other than black) or right after text that is hyperlinked, but it's not consistent. This has also happened in text using paragraph styles and text using list styles. We've run into this issue in two different RH projects (one much larger than the other but both created previous to upgrading to RH 8), and it usually occurs when we have been working heavily in the projects, making changes to lots of topics per day.

    Some advice we've seen in similar forum topics is to avoid using the Change Font Color button in the toolbar and only use the Font dialog box (from the Format menu in the menu bar or from the side menu that opens when you right-click). As a workaround, we periodically run a search (Find and Replace in Files dialog box) on the word "transparent" to try to catch any issues before they get into the product; the search also finds any intentional uses of "transparent" as a background color in tables, but we can at least look at each instance and make sure no text font is transparent.

    Thanks,

    RuTechWriter

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