Revenge of the RoboHelp List Styles

Report · Jul 01, 2008

Well I THOUGHT I had this problem licked with a workaround; now I'm having a new peculiar problem that has me completely stumped. In short, in RH, all of my list styles (numbers, bullets, notes) are getting an extra space inserted after the bullet, number or the word "Note."

Using my standard bullet style as the example:

FrameMaker Autonumber Format:
o\t##
[that's a bullet character, tab, and two blank spaces)
Character format = Bullet
With this format, all my bullets in FM line up quite beautifully.

RH Result:
o###Some text.
[that's a bullet, followed by three spaces and the text. The third space however appears bold while the first two blank spaces are not bold.]

Matching RH HTML:
o ##Some text

Where o is a bullet character
### are extra untagged blank spaces (not a just a blank space) inserted into the HTML.
If I manually remove these blank spaces, the extra bold space in the line is deleted.

Does anybody know where this is coming from? There is nothing in the CSS for the Bullet style that would cause the insertion of extra blank spaces (just standard CSS properties).
Also, my mapping is fine; I import my own CSS after the FM updates and apply it to all topics, which works fine an updates my styles correctly. The extra space business is happening immediately after the initial import and FM update and doesn't go away when I apply my own CSS to the files.

Any help would be enormously appreciated. Frankly, I'm stumped. Right now, I have to manually go through each topic and delete the extra space.

By the way, I'm using RH 7.02.

Report · Jul 03, 2008

Just an idea even though you may have already tried this. If you select to convert numbered lists in the FrameMaker import window (I cannot tell the exact GUI name of that button because I dont use the english version) then this also converts most bullet lists into "real" HTML lists (with UL and LI-elements). We had inconsistent results, but this may this works for you because WHEN a "real" bullet list showed up in RoboHelp, then it was formatted correctly.

Report · Jul 03, 2008

I have tried that approach. The only problem is that my unique list styles (Notes, with the word "Note" in Numbering properties) won't convert properly if I use the Convert to HTML option in RoboHelp. And I don't trust it to correctly convert complex nested lists. The conversion also seems to trip over the last list item in nested lists.

Report · Jul 03, 2008

I am now convinced that this is a bug introduced by the 7.02 update.

I downgraded to 7.01, and this problem went away. Adobe, PLEASE check into this. I don't mean to get annoying, but perhaps if your FM-RH team would spend more time fixing these bugs and less time pushing RH-AIR applications, then this product would be much better.

quote:

Originally posted by: michaelscohen
Well I THOUGHT I had this problem licked with a workaround; now I'm having a new peculiar problem that has me completely stumped. In short, in RH, all of my list styles (numbers, bullets, notes) are getting an extra space inserted after the bullet, number or the word "Note."

Using my standard bullet style as the example:

FrameMaker Autonumber Format:
o\t##
[that's a bullet character, tab, and two blank spaces)
Character format = Bullet
With this format, all my bullets in FM line up quite beautifully.

RH Result:
o###Some text.
[that's a bullet, followed by three spaces and the text. The third space however appears bold while the first two blank spaces are not bold.]

Matching RH HTML:
o ##Some text

Where o is a bullet character
### are extra untagged blank spaces (not a just a blank space) inserted into the HTML.

The closing tag ends at the end of a line in the HTML. It is at THIS point that the extra spaces are inserted.
In 7.01, this does not happen, but it DOES occur in 7.02, so I must conclude that this is a bug.
If I manually remove these blank spaces, the extra bold space in the line is deleted.

Does anybody know where this is coming from? There is nothing in the CSS for the Bullet style that would cause the insertion of extra blank spaces (just standard CSS properties).
Also, my mapping is fine; I import my own CSS after the FM updates and apply it to all topics, which works fine an updates my styles correctly. The extra space business is happening immediately after the initial import and FM update and doesn't go away when I apply my own CSS to the files.

Any help would be enormously appreciated. Frankly, I'm stumped. Right now, I have to manually go through each topic and delete the extra space.

By the way, I'm using RH 7.02.