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Question

Phantom Empty Paragraphs Added to Topics and HTML

Forum|Forum|2 months ago
November 18, 2025
4 replies
194 views

Had a very strange problem start today. On the project I'm currently creating I have started to have empty paragraphs show up on both the visual and code view... and, they KEEP MULTIPLYING every time I change views from one to the other. In the code, they look like this:

" <h2-blue class="Heading"><span style="line-height:1;"><span id="" style="color: rgb(0, 39, 118);line-height: 1">FTIS Menu</span></span></h2-blue>

<p>

<h2-blue class="Heading">Taxpayer Information</h2-blue>"

I mean there's nothing that I'm aware of that would cause this. I am inserting snippets after the headings, but there is nothing in those that would cause this, and in fact, there are places where there is only a heading and no snippet and it still inserts them. At one point, the bottom of the page had over 3,000 empty paragraph tags.

Has anyone else run into this problem before? I'm at wits end. I don't see ANYTHING in the code that would do this. I've removed the "<p> <br /> </p>" tags as I did see a random reference to that as a possible issue.

I'm also using a single style sheet and changed all the snippets to utilize the same style as the document to avoid a cascading issue.

HELP!

I'm using Robohelp version 2022.6.34 on a Windows 10 box.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

I'wondering where you are editing that style?

If you are selecting the heading in the topic, what you should be doing is editing the CSS. Double click it and then make your changes.

Come back when you are ready but I do think you must be doing something fundamentally wrong and I'm happy to help you track it down.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

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jeremyk54602636Author

Known Participant

For the most part, that IS where I've been editing the .css. I haven't been double clicking the tag from the right hand panel, but I've been editing the .css from the assets list in the project.

But, like I said I do need to move on. In the meantime, I do have what I hope is a quick/easy question for you. I notice on your site there are a number of h2 topics where you build a border around the text that extends the width of the page. For the life of me, I can not get the border/background to reach to container extents. I've tried setting the width to 100% and I've tried a fixed setting of 1000px in an effort to get it to expand. But, it still sizes to the text. I know I can cheat and build a 1 column/1 line table - but that's messy and extra html.

How do you get yours to size correctly?

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Open the About RoboHelp sample project. You can copy the style from there. 🙂

________________________________________________________

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Very often people will amend default.css and then say they are using the default.css. Technically correct, they are, but it is not as supplied and could have been amended in a way that causes issues. I rather doubt this is a CSS issue but we have to rule it out.

Tackle this a different way.

Create a new project.
Copy the rogue topic into it using File Explorer. Do not import it.
Import the

Does the problem still occur?

If it does, in code view amend

<h2-blue class="Heading"><span style="line-height:1;"><span id="" style="color: rgb(0, 39, 118);line-height: 1">

to

<h2>

If the problem still occurs, share this demo project with me. See the Contact page on my site and send the project as instructed there. Do make sure you include a link to this thread and please do not email the project direct. I will take a look in the morning.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

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jeremyk54602636Author

Known Participant

Hmmm.... okay. So copying the file into the new project still exhibits the problem. Amending the h2-blue to h2 resolves the problem. What in this .css setting could be the cause of the problem -- or is the .css file simply corrupt and deleting and recreating the .css would resolve it. I've attached a copy of the settings for that tag. I apologize it is a photo, but I work for a government agency and cannot send image files outside of the bldg (even if they are as inocuous as a .css entry).

First, thank you for all your help so far... we are definitely narrowing it down. But, what is your suggestion to fix the issue?

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

When you apply H2 to a paragraph, RoboHelp will simply write it as H2. All the extra stuff is inline styling that you have applied. Why are you not defining H2 in the CSS to get what you want rather than selecting the paragraph and applying the styling inline?

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

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Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

To figure out if it's the project or the update, try it out in one of the sample projects - if it misbehaves in there, you might have discovered a bug.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

The first two things I would do are:-

Reboot the machine.
Apply the supplied default.css to the topic and see if it still happens. If your CSS is named default.css, create a new project and lift a fresh unedited copy from there applying a new name before you copy it in.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

Use menu (bottom right) to mark as Best Answer or to Highlight particularly useful replies. Found the answer elsewhere? Share it here.

jeremyk54602636Author

Known Participant

I applied the default.css with a similar result. I'm not sure what you mean, exactly, with the second half of your suggestion. Create a new project, copy the default.css to the old project assets folder?

Sorry, if that's a silly question, but I'm new to Robohelp and this is my first project. I love using it... except for this glitch...

jeremyk54602636Author

Known Participant

I should note that I rebooted the machine prior to posting here.

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