Why would my Help screen not rebuild if I right click on it, display properties then close properties?

Report · Jun 17, 2009

I have made a number of Help files for an application and all of them have been done in the same way. However the Test dept have found that with one Help file, when they right click on the Help pane and choose 'Properties', then close the properties window, the Help pane's tabs and text do not reappear in the area that was obscured by the properties window.

The Help file then freezes up and, if the user cannot get access to the desktop to close Help through Task manager, the system needs to be rebooted.

I have tried a recompile of the Help but the problem still occurs.

Any ideas?

Report · Jun 17, 2009

What sort of help are we talking about? CHM, WebHelp, etc.

Does it occur on any machine or just the test machine?

Where is the help installed, locally or on a server?

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Report · Jun 17, 2009

The error occurs with the Compiled HTML File on my machine and is also occurring when the Help is incorporated into the software build in sandbox and tested on two seperate test machines.

Report · Jun 17, 2009

Not the answers I wanted. Particularly as it occurs on your machine so you cannot blame the developers. And I guess saying that no one will right click and access Properties would not wash.

Create a copy of the project and use that for fault finding. Unless there is anything you can think of that is a bit different, trash half the topics and try again. Repeat until it starts working.

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Report · Jun 17, 2009

To add to Peter's advice check the following:

There are no special characters (e.g. underscores) in the CHM file name.
You have a $global_ prefix on all your window names if you are using merged help files.

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Report · Jun 17, 2009

Thanks guys - not the answers I particularly wanted to hear either but I appreciate the assistance.

Report · Jun 17, 2009

Hi there

I know this is posted in the RoboHelp for Word category, so not sure how you might manage this as you are creating a CHM file. But here goes.

I'm wondering if the issue could be related to your Window definition. There are lots of niggly little settings for a CHM that may be enabled or disabled. I might suggest that you try declaring a new default window for the CHM.

If you are using RoboHelp for Word, I cannot help you with how that's done. But if you are using RoboHelp HTML and this post is just appearing in the wrong category, there may be hope.

I'd try that and see if the behavior changes.

Cheers... Rick

Report · Jun 17, 2009

Hi Pete - I haven't changed anything and am not sure how I would check if what you described is the case - can you elaborate? In layman's terms as I'm by no means familiar with this app.

Cheers

Hi Captiv8r - I placed the question here just because Word is the program that the content for the Help is created in. When I open the Robohelp files for editing, Word opens also. Apologies if here is not correct but I'm new to Robohelp and figured the Word connection was valid?

Again can you explain how I would declare a new default window?

Thanks for the hope guys

Report · Jun 17, 2009

Hi,

If you've configured the Help window to automatically hide the navigation pane when the user clicks outside the window, try turning off this feature. There is a bug in this feature that causes the problem you've described.

No other workaround, unfortunately, other than to turn off the automatically-hide-the-navigation-pane feature.

Pete

Report · Jun 25, 2009

Look in your source document for odd characters. Specifically look for curly quotes - both single and double and replace with straight quotes.

Look for superscript such as the st after 1st. Check for em an en dashes and replace with hyphens. You may need to change your Word autocorrect options to disable these from recurring...

Is this a help system created in an older version of RH for Word?

What version of RH and version of Word are you using?

Try generating webhelp output in this project. Does the same thing happen?

Also, when testing, zip your RH project up first. You'll feel better...