Serious issue in WebHelp navigation panel

Report · Sep 01, 2008

In our team, we use RoboHELP 6 to generate WebHelp output for using the online help system on UNIX platforms.

To our customers, we provided a list of web browsers which are supported for viewing online Help. While "certifying" additional browsers, we spotted a serious issue with the navigation pane. After closer examination, we discovered that some minor issues existed in the already supported browsers. In the text below, M14, M17, F2, F3, IE6, IE7 mean Mozilla 1.4, Mozilla 1.7, Firefox 2.0.0.16, Firefox 3.0.1, Internet Explorer 6.0, Internet Explorer 7.0, respectively.

Here are the problems we experience:

- Navigation pane vertical size is only app. one fifth of the vertical size of the web browser window, making use of TOC, Index, Search, and Glossary tabs very inconvenient. Users need to use scroll bars excessively. (present in M17, F2 on HP-UX, F2 on Linux; not present in F2, F3 on Windows)

- Scrolling functionality in Glossary pane is broken. After vertical scroll arrows are clicked, vertical scroll bar simply disappears and horizontal scroll bar appears instead, which cannot be used for scrolling through glossary entries. Scrolling using arrow keys does not function either. Therefore, users cannot use Glossary pane at all. (present in F2 on HP-UX, F2 on Linux; not present in M14, M17 on HP-UX)

Note that in M14 on HP-UX and Linux, and in IE6 and IE7 on Windows, none of the above problems occur.

I hope someone can give a tip on how to try solving this issue.

Thanks in advance.

Report · Sep 03, 2008

Hi Bostjan,

One idea for you - try a small test project using different nav pane format settings:

Right-click on your WebHelp layout under Single Source Layouts.
On the 3rd page of WebHelp Options, set the Preferred Navigation Pane Format settings to use "Pure HTML" only. See if that works in your problem environments first. Then try the other combinations to see if your problem is DHTML or Java.

Good luck!
Jeanne

Report · Sep 08, 2008

Jeanne,

Thanks for answering.

I tried changing the setting Preferred Navigation Pane Format, however, the results were not satisfactory.

What is the most interesting aspect of the second issue (broken Glossary pane) is that the issue exists in newer browsers or browser versions (on Linux an HP-UX) and that on Windows systems, the issue was not seen with all browsers which were tested.

Has anybody else spotted these issues, too?