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Publishing webhelp for offline (filesystem) use

New Here ,
Sep 14, 2021 Sep 14, 2021

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Hi All -

 

What would you suggest is current best-practice for providing searchable/browsable RoboHelp output for use offline?

We currently generate Responsive HTML output from RoboHelp for the help/reference system for our products.

This is generally dumped onto the local filesystem when a customer installs the product, and they then use a web-browser to access it. Typically, this would be on a maritime vessel with no internet access.

For years this has worked satisfactorily, but more recently we have been encountering problems which are preventing the help from working correctly. Specifcally, most of these issues seem to be linked to browsers blocking cross-origin requests (see attached image). This manifests itself as menu links not working, searches returning zero results, and books failing to display linked topics.

corserrors.png

The output all works fine when served over http, but we need it to be accessible locally from the filesystem.

We are running RoboHelp Classic 2019 (update 14) and most of our target platforms are Linux (some Windows).

 

Many thanks in advance for your advice and opinions!

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Community Expert ,
Sep 14, 2021 Sep 14, 2021

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I would go to creating HTML5 help - I think most browsers work fine with that on local LAN (vs. webserver) systems.

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New Here ,
Sep 14, 2021 Sep 14, 2021

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Hi Jeff - thanks for your reply. We are already using Responsive HTML5 for output. It is the scripts generated by that output that seem to trigger these errors (standard webhelp ouput causes similar issues). The console log above is from Firefox 78.7 on Redhat, but behaviour is the same on Windows.

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Community Expert ,
Sep 14, 2021 Sep 14, 2021

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Sorry missed that - got fixated on the subject line. I'm creating HTML5 from RH11 and it seems to have no issues dealing with being located locally or on a LAN server - I deliberately changed from WebHelp to avoid browser compatibility issues that I was getting. Have you made sure that JavaScript is enabled & that the help locations are considered "safe" or "trusted locations"?

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Community Expert ,
Sep 14, 2021 Sep 14, 2021

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Can you run a test with RH2019 New UI output (try both Responsive and Frameless) to see if the same issues occur? It might be the architecture of the Classic output is running in to new, stricter security features implemented by the browsers. There's a chance (no guarantee) that the newer version no longer has this issue.

 

Alternatively, I think some browsers allow the strictness to be wound back, for now, so you could investigate that and whether it's feasible to ask your customers to do that. (Do note that the settings are likely to be very temporary and subject to change without notice.)

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