A

Anonymous

Question

RH7 TOC books don't open in Firefox

Forum|Forum|18 years ago
November 27, 2007
45 replies
5091 views

I just upgraded from RoboHelp 6 to 7. The first thing I did after the upgrade was to generate my Webhelp project. I wanted to check that the output was acceptable. In Mozilla and IE, the output is fine. When the help opens, the book containing my default topic is open in the TOC and all the other books open and close when I click them.

But in the Firefox, all the TOC books are closed when the help first opens. None of the books will open until I click the book containing my default topic. After I open that book, the others open as they should.

I don't have this problem with the help I generated this morning before I upgraded.

Any ideas as to what's causing this?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

I am aware of the problem you are seeing and as I indicated in another thread, I will be posting something about it. I need to test some more but I believe the bottom line is that for as long as you link books to topics, you will have this problem until a bug is fixed.

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D

dgweisblatt

Known Participant

Here's more info...It's more simple than I thought. (You could do this test in 30 seconds!)

In RoboHelp, I opened File > Generate Primary Layout. I changed the Introduction.html file to another file that's further down the TOC. I generated the output and the strange behavior happens in FF and not in IE - the topic opens very briefly and then the focus pops to the parent topic.

Have you ever seen this before? Any ideas?

D

dgweisblatt

Known Participant

I applied the fix (in the whthost.js file) suggested here and the toc does open. However, when I use context-sensitive help, a strange thing happens: The correct topic opens for less than a second and then the topic above opens and remains open.

This only happens in FF and not IE.

I am working with RoboHelp 7.02.001, Firefox 3.0.1, IE 7.0.5730.11, XP 5.1 SP3.

I would be happy to generate a small example and send it to someone to view.

B

BillK1948

Participating Frequently

So you are saying that there are two problems when you are using FF:
1) Your toc does not work unless you modify whthost.js
2) Context sensitive help linking doesn't work properly

Do I understand from your earlier post that your toc problem only happens when you have 4 levels of toc?

I tried making a project with 5 levels of toc - the toc levels open okay when using the browse buttons or choosing a topic from the index, etc. The auto created browse sequence is a little messed up, but I often have to adjust this manually after doing an auto create.

I cannot get the 'brief opening of a topic and then jump to the one above' to happen at all - even trying your method of using a lower level topic as the default opening topic. I'm testing in FF, by the way, and I have updated to v3.0.3 to see if it made any difference.

What happens exactly when you don't modify whthost.js?

D

dgweisblatt

Known Participant

So sorry. I may have spoken too soon. We're testing it now. I'll let you know...Did you ever hear of the "chunk" problem? It also affects TOCs opening...It happens when the levels are nested "too" low. I know...it's not good practice to have topics nested so low (4 levels), but sometimes it can't be helped. I'll let you know. Thanks very much!

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dgweisblatt

Known Participant

I tried this solution and it didn't work for me either. This is really frustrating. Any updates on this issue?

B

BillK1948

Participating Frequently

Please could you define the problem you are experiencing?
I agree with Peter that, for me at least, the RH updates have addressed the TOC problems.
I am using Firefox 2.0.0.17, RH for HTML 7.02.001, XP SP3, IE 7.0.5730.13
I'm producing sometimes complex, sometimes simple, HTML guides and in every case they work without fault in respect of TOC, browse, and back functionality without having to make any mods after the RH compile.
So maybe it would be useful to explore what is different between your system and mine - how do your version numbers compare to mine?

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Which solution? There are a number posted here.

A lot of FF issues were fixed in the patches for RH7. Do you have those applied?

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D

dgweisblatt

Known Participant

I tried this solution and it did not work - messed up both IE and Firefox.

E

Ejung

Known Participant

Thanks Bill and Peter for your help!
I uninstalled RH7 (and deleted the folder), reinstalled it, and applied the update. The TOC autosync works (yipee!).
I did notice that the Back button works intermittently. Here are my steps:
1. Open a topic in Firefox.
2. Click Show (to show TOC).
3. Click on other topics.
4. Click Back.
Instead of taking me back to the previous topic, it collapses the TOC. After modifying the whnjs.htm file (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 7\RoboHTML\WebHelp5Ext\template_stock), this problem was fixed. So it is still important to apply the changes to this file.

Thanks again.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Bill

I am getting the same results as you. Synching works just fine except after a search. Esc makes no difference.

Eilan

Sounds like you need to try Bill's solution.

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H

HKabaker

Inspiring

I've been away from this discussion for some time, but I'd like to ask:

When you first open the WebHelp output in Firefox, does the spinning wheel stop by itself?

If not, press Esc to make it stop.

Then test the TOC behavior.

My initial finding last week was that the TOC and reload function work normally only if you have ended the load with Esc. After you reload the page from the browser refresh icon, you must again press Esc or the TOC and reload functions will break.

Can anyone confirm or reject these conclusions?

Harvey

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BillK1948

Participating Frequently

After updating my RoboHelp to 7.01.001 I did some testing to see if any of the previous js mods were still necessary. On my system the only modification needed is to the whnjs.htm file to make the loading stop in Firefox.

I also found that the behaviour of Firefox in relation to toc operations was unaffected by:
1) the use of a modified whnjs.htm file
2) the use of an unmodified whnjs.htm file with the loading icon continuously spinning during all the testing of the toc operation
3) the use of an unmodified whnjs.htm file together with the use of the Esc key to stop the spinning loading icon before testing the toc operation

As I reported earlier, the only defect in Firefox toc operation that I am able to detect is that a topic selected by use of the Index or Search is not highlighted in the toc - whether the loading icon is spinning or not. Otherwise books open and topics are highlighted correctly when using the browse buttons or following links within topics.

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