Conditional tags throw off spacing in HTML output

[LostInSpaces]

Hi, we use conditional tags to mark text to be hidden/shown when generated.

The marked text displays in html help as though there’s no space between the words “Customer” and “Definiton”:

In the source file (below), I can see that there's a space that isn't tagged, but when we look at the output of this page, suddenly there's no space. Please see attached for images that show what we're dealing with.

Any ideas as to what's going on here? I wondered if it had something to do with bolded words, since the other tags of the same or similar non-bolded words were displaying correctly.

Has anyone experienced this before?

[RoboColum_n_]

Can you post the code from the HTML tab so we can see what is happening. I suspect you are right in that the different tags are getting confused but it is hard to say definitively without the underlying code.

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[LostInSpaces]

Here is the section with the problem (sorry, image doesn't show up very large so I tried to resize it):

Please let me know if you need to see more. Thanks for looking at this, Colum.

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

Try replacing the space that is between the span tags with a non breaking space as shown at http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_entities.asp

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@petergrainge

[LostInSpaces]

Peter, even with adding the non-breaking space as you suggested, it's not working. Now, it adds a second space (see below). From a couple of other discussions ("Intermittently missing the space after bolded text", "Losing space after image" etc) I can see that this may be a bug with version 7.

Sorry it took me a while to respond -- we got busy and I couldn't generate until yesterday.

[Peter Grainge]

What happens if you move the space from between the closing span tag and the next span tag to in front of Definition?

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@petergrainge

[LostInSpaces]

Adding a " " between the span tags and using it to take the space between the span tags doesn't seem to work.

We're new to using the conditional tags on text, so this problem is new to us. Before, we used conditional tags to hide certain pages during generation, but now with hiding/showing bolded text on the page, this spacing issue is coming up.

I wonder if we have to upgrade to RH version 8 just to avoid this problem...? If this was a bug in version 7, that may be our only option to address the problem.

[LostInSpaces]

In the "Intermittently missing the space after bolded text" post, one person suggested unmarking "W3C compliant topics" (below), but we don't use that setting -- I just checked.

Old post:

Re: RoboHelp 7 - Intermittently missing the space after bolded text in

The easiest way to solve this issue is not to enable the option "W3C compliant topics" when generating the webhelp output. If you do this, you may get the "married words" issue. I have also experienced this problem, as well as other work mates, and it was solved disabling the "W3C compliant topics" option.

[MergeThis]

You said: "Peter, even with adding [my emphasis] the non-breaking space as you suggested..." However, Peter suggested replacing the space with the HTML code element, not adding.

Did you replace or add?

Good luck,

Leon

[LostInSpaces]

Thanks for making me go back, Leon. I think I did add the code vs replacing the space with the code. It's fixed now!

I apologize for my confusion. Thank you all for your help and expertise.

Amity