Problem displaying WebHelp in firefox called from web application

Question

We're using RoboHelp 7.03. When the WebHelp is generated, it seems that the navigation topics all immediately begin with a few illegal characters. This isn't a problem in IE -- it ignores these characters and displays our help pages fine. In Firefox, however, the WebHelp loops when trying to open the main topic page and does not display the "Show TOC" link for the sub-pages. (The navigation pages I'm referring to are the skin files, whgdata files, whdata, etc.)

I should note, this occurs only for the project that we're calling from within a web-based application we offer our customers. Firefox displays the WebHelp correctly when opened regularly from the browser.

I did a search-and-replace operation on the WebHelp published for the web application. Removing the illegal characters took care of the problem, but I'm wondering if there is any way to remove these characters from the output so we don't have to remember to do the search and replace each time we publish the project? (It's in beta stage right now; we're going to be republishing the help fairly often.)

I'm not sure if these will display properly, but the illegal characters look like this: ï»¿

Thank you,

Sasha M.

Peter Grainge · Accepted Answer

Those characters are known as the BOM characters. See item 22 in http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh7/using_rh7.htm.

You say the behaviour is different when you run the help independently and when the developers call the help. Could it be that you are viewing it from a different location? What if the help is run from the location the developer's use but independently of the application?

Visit www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

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