Japanese characters in left pane

[Guest]

I have a project that has been translated into Japanese, and the left pane of my FlashHelp system does not render the characters correctly. The funny thing is that I got it to work in another project that was translated, one that I think was built in X5 (or possibly earlier) and has a skin that RoboHelp says should be updated when I generate the output. I don't dare change it now, and it seems to work fine.

Unfortunately, I didn't make a record of exactly how I got that to work , but I seem to remember it had to do with embedding Japanese characters in the Flash skin files. Fonts are also declared in the skin .fhs file and the accompanying XML file, and I'm not sure how they interact, but it seems that the fonts in the Flash files supercede those in the skin file.

In my newer project, the toolbar buttons show up in Japanese, as do the "terms" and "definitions" headings in the glossary and the index keyword prompt. It's the TOC entries, glossary terms, and index terms that have the problem, and they are all driven by the file skin_textnode.swf. As long as the other files are set to Arial or Arial Unicode MS in Flash, they display Japanese correctly, even if Japanese isn't embedded (using "anti-alias for animation"). Without Japanese embedded in skin_textnode.fla, I get this kind of nonsense in the left pane: 検索する. But with Japanese embedded, I get symbols like paragraph symbols, plus-or-minus signs, and daggers. I have also saved the .hhc file (the TOC) and the .hhk (index) in UTF-8 format using Notepad, but no change there. The junk characters also show up in the overlaying window when clicking a term in the index, and that's driven by skin_index.fla. I've tried the font and character embedding with that file. I have tried changing "font-family:Arial" in the skin file to both "font:"Arial Unicode MS"" and "font:"Arial"". No difference.

I have compared files with that earlier project. As far as I can tell, I have done things comparably, but the junk characters persist in the left pane. It doesn't appear that there are substantial differences between the way the old and new skins are executed to cause the Japanese to work in one and not the other. Any ideas that may help me make this work again? I'm using RoboHelp 6, Windows XP SP2, IE 6. (In theory, making this work for Japanese will also solve my problem for Russian. I'm hoping the language capabilities of RH7 handle all of this better so I don't have to use these work-arounds for non-Roman characters.)

I know this is a load of information, but I've tried to describe the circumstances adequately without writing the great American novel. I'll clarify anything that's needed. Thanks,

Ben

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Solved: I found once more that the TOC, glossary, and index information is pulled from files in the whxdata folder: whtdata...xml, whgdata...xml, and whidata...xml, respectively, which are all in UTF-8 format. The Japanese characters have to be changed in these files, but they get overwritten during a build, so they have to be stored with the correct characters in another location. Fortunately, our glossary will probably not be changing, but the TOC and index will grow as the project moves forward, so this will take some babysitting.

This all leads me to wonder why RoboHelp generates copies of the .glo, .hhk, and .hhc files into the output folder when it's the XML files that are used instead...