Question
misaligned formatted ascii examples
(Running the laterst updated of Framemaker 8 and Robohelp 7
HTML)
I have a command-language reference manual that contains many preformatted programming source code and program listing or screen output examples. These examples are captured from a console screen by select-copy and pasted into Framemaker. They are then tweaked to fit the page measure and a style is applied to make them all monospaced (courier). To retain the format, soft spaces are replaced with non-breaking spaces (ctrl-space). The PDF output is correct.
On import to Robohelp, the code examples are misaligned in design view and look even worse on the rendered HTML help. Looking at the HTML code, there appear to be random strings of tagged non-breaking spaces:
 </spaces> > > > <spaces>
The only way I could get the examples to display and render correctly was to strip out all the HTML coding, realign the examples manually, and insert a single <pre><\pre> tag pair around the example. This is a lot of post-processing to get the help output.
To try to get this to work properly, I created a test file in Frame with a preformatted monospaced courier example.
I used soft spaces, hard spaces, and tabs to format and align a version of the example. I also pasted in a flat-text version using the different "paste special" options. The PDF output was correct in all instances.
On import to Robohelp, all the examples were randomly misaligned except for the tabbed example, where the tabs were stripped out completely
I also tried importing flat ascii and Word examples into frames, but no success there either.
When I look back at previous versions created with much older versions of FM-to-Robohelp, the html code seemed to replace preformatted spaces with a character code for spaces, so strings of white space looked as follows:
    
The spacing problem has only appeared when we upgraded to FM8 with RH7 and it occurs for every preformatted example in the book.
Has anyone experienced this, and how did you create preformatted content in your FM files so that it imported and rendered correctly in RH7
I have a command-language reference manual that contains many preformatted programming source code and program listing or screen output examples. These examples are captured from a console screen by select-copy and pasted into Framemaker. They are then tweaked to fit the page measure and a style is applied to make them all monospaced (courier). To retain the format, soft spaces are replaced with non-breaking spaces (ctrl-space). The PDF output is correct.
On import to Robohelp, the code examples are misaligned in design view and look even worse on the rendered HTML help. Looking at the HTML code, there appear to be random strings of tagged non-breaking spaces:
 </spaces> > > > <spaces>
The only way I could get the examples to display and render correctly was to strip out all the HTML coding, realign the examples manually, and insert a single <pre><\pre> tag pair around the example. This is a lot of post-processing to get the help output.
To try to get this to work properly, I created a test file in Frame with a preformatted monospaced courier example.
I used soft spaces, hard spaces, and tabs to format and align a version of the example. I also pasted in a flat-text version using the different "paste special" options. The PDF output was correct in all instances.
On import to Robohelp, all the examples were randomly misaligned except for the tabbed example, where the tabs were stripped out completely
I also tried importing flat ascii and Word examples into frames, but no success there either.
When I look back at previous versions created with much older versions of FM-to-Robohelp, the html code seemed to replace preformatted spaces with a character code for spaces, so strings of white space looked as follows:
    
The spacing problem has only appeared when we upgraded to FM8 with RH7 and it occurs for every preformatted example in the book.
Has anyone experienced this, and how did you create preformatted content in your FM files so that it imported and rendered correctly in RH7
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