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A
Anonymous
July 31, 2009
Answered

How to prevent conversion of & in special characters to &

  • July 31, 2009
  • 2 replies
  • 1106 views

I'm trying to use the special character √ in my help files.  However, the editor keeps changing the ampersand to & whenever I go from HTML to design view.  How do I stop this behaviour?

Thanks

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer

    Several people have had trouble with HTML special characters in their "spelled-out" versions.

    Have you tried a numeric enconding for the same symbol? My Windows charmap shows a character reference of U+221A (I think this translates to UTF-8 0x221A); a site called webref.info shows an HTML encoding of &#8730. The HTML numeric seems more likely, but I think that RH went UTF-8 compliant in version RH7 or 8.

    You could also try select/copy/paste from Windows charmap - I don't know if that will work better, but RoboHelp is fairly Windows-oriented.

    Sorry I can't be more specific, but I have an older version of RH and can't test these suggestions.

    2 replies

    A
    Anonymous
    July 31, 2009

    @Captiv8r, the problem is that it doesn't display properly on the outputs because of the conversion of the ampersand

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    July 31, 2009

    Hi again

    Okay, my bad. I thought we were dealing with basic ampersand ( & ). I see you wanted the radical ( √ ).

    I just tried what was suggested with using √ and it seems to work fine. At least in RoboHelp 7 it does.

    Cheers... Rick

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    A
    Anonymous
    Correct answer
    July 31, 2009

    Several people have had trouble with HTML special characters in their "spelled-out" versions.

    Have you tried a numeric enconding for the same symbol? My Windows charmap shows a character reference of U+221A (I think this translates to UTF-8 0x221A); a site called webref.info shows an HTML encoding of &#8730. The HTML numeric seems more likely, but I think that RH went UTF-8 compliant in version RH7 or 8.

    You could also try select/copy/paste from Windows charmap - I don't know if that will work better, but RoboHelp is fairly Windows-oriented.

    Sorry I can't be more specific, but I have an older version of RH and can't test these suggestions.

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    July 31, 2009

    Hi there

    Personally, I'm wondering why it's a problem for you. Do the characters display different than you want in the resulting HTML page? If not, don't sweat it. Let RoboHelp do what it needs to do with the character on the back side.

    In the ends, as long as it displays as it should, will it really matter?

    Cheers... Rick

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