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Participant
March 6, 2008
Question

Simplified Chinese index is gibberish

  • March 6, 2008
  • 5 replies
  • 996 views
I use RH7 from the Tech suite and look forward to the Unicode support that is implicit in this release. I have a project that creates perfectly vaild topic pages internally, but the index is gibberish.

I have set the project language to Simplified Chinese, I have set the default language to Simplified Chinese in the tools menu (just in case), and I have recreated the hhk file just to be sure.

When I run the index wizard, I see the chinese chars in the display, but when I compile the project, I see :"Warning: Data loss is converting data using choosen(sic) language."

Why is this happenning? I have looked at the hhk file in Notepad and it is Unicode (UTF8). Why is it being converted?

Any help would be appreciated,
Kevin
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    5 replies

    Participating Frequently
    March 7, 2008
    Hi Kevin,

    Have you applied 7.01 RoboHelp update?

    It seems that you are generating CHM output on a system where Simplified Chinese is not a primary language. Try generating WebHelp and see if Index comes alright.

    For CHM compliation RoboHelp converts Unicode data to Multi Byte encoding before passing it to CHM compiler. What this means is that on an english system, where Windows 1252 is the default encoding format which does not support simplified chinese characters, CHM generation will have junk characters for chinese characters.

    If you provide more information then may be I can provide you better inputs.

    Vivek.
    Adobe Systems.
    Participant
    March 7, 2008
    Vivek_k:

    Thanks for the explanation. I am using RH7 from the Tech suite (automatically updated).

    What you say makes sense, but all topic text is correct. Just the index contains gibberish (some valid, many not).

    If I look at the xpj file it has the language as 2052 which I am guessing is Simplified Chinese. Unfortunately not all the characters appear to be supported by that code page.

    I have to get the manuals out, so I just turned off the index button for now. Better to not provide an index, than to provide a broken one. Hopefully I can get this issue resolved.

    Thanks again, Kevin
    April 21, 2008
    You need to change the regional settings in the Control Panel to Chinese and reboot the computer. I usually change the country both in the regional settings, and in the advanced settings tab. This has worked fine for me.