Not yet. Bug report submitted. Message was edited by: Amebr ... View more

Thanks I will. We're just evaluating this output at the moment. ... View more

I deleted all the individual paths in this file, and went right back to a common root folder, so I don't have to specify the path for every project. This seems to work okay. ... View more

After further testing, if I copy my working generated output somewhere else, it too stops working and displays the grey/green background. I'm thinking there's some sort of hardcoded path occurring, but I'm not sure where to look. ... View more

Good to hear it's resolved. ... View more

If I have a large table I need to resort, I save a temp file elsewhere and open in Word. Use the sort functionality in Word and Save As HTML (Filtered). Then I open the htm file in a text editor with HTML and regular expression support and strip out all but the basic table, td, etc tags. Then I copy and paste just the table code back into my original topic in RH HTML view and reformat there. It's ugly, but for large tables quicker than manually copying and pasting individual cells. Having said that, I've noticed that you can copy and past multiple rows now in RH8. However there is one bug. If you copy multiple cells that have hyperlinks in them, copying them into a different part of the table breaks all of the links - RH helpfully adds duplicate and hardcoded path information to each link. If you only do one cell it seems to keep the correct path information. HTH ... View more

RH8 pretends that type="text/css" is written. This is why I'm suggesting looking at the source file in an external editor such as Notepad, to check if it is really there in the source. I've attached a screenshot of the same topic in RH8 and in Notepad to illustrate. Both examples are the source file, just one is in RH8 and one is in Notepad. ... View more

Hmm, one thing I discovered after my original post is that when viewing HTML within RH, the file shows type="text/css" but when you look at the html in an external viewer (e.g. notepad) the same file will actually have type="". I just did a test Find and replace in Files within RH8 and that seemed to correctly search on the actual HTML, rather than the incorrect HTML View. So the global find and replace in RH should pick up any occurrences of this. For the person who did the search and didn't find any occurrences, I'm afraid I have no other ideas, unless it was just a search within a single topic in which case everything looks good but isn't (but the post sounded like it was a global search). ... View more

It sounds like you are using source control. Have you tried checking out your entire project before upgrading? I've noticed RH can sometimes get a little confused trying to checkout and upgrade at the same time. ... View more

Ah, I knew the display problem was familiar, but couldn't remember what the resolution was. Ensuring type="text/css" was in the stylesheet definition in all my topics resolved my issues. See this thread for more details (including the methods that applied the change for me): Fonts and Style Changes in Generated Help ... View more

I replied previously to your other post and just want to say here that none of our help files have underscores or other characters - letters only. So I don't think the problem is linked to underscores in filenames. I'll post this in the other discussion also, to keep it all together. ... View more

We just had a project open in RH8 on XP Professional and it was fine. Although it was a test project with only about 4 topics and not source controlled like our normal ones. ... View more

Robohelp seems to insist that the merged files are part of the master project which isn't actually required. They're just references that come into play if the file is found in the required spot. What we do is create the merge, then delete the actual files from the master project, and from source control if you use it. The files are still referenced in baggage as broken links. The merge will still work when you copy/generate/publish the files into the required directory. This has solved a couple of problems for us: * chm sometimes not updating * chms being compiled into the master chm and massively increasing the file size. One caveat: if you are using source control, you'll have to copy the chms back into the master project baggage location (usually the project root) and into source control if you need to remove them from the merge. Note: In another discussion the question was raised whether underscores in the filenames might cause this. However none of our help files have underscores or other characters in the filenames, only letters, so I don't think this is the issue. (I believe it's because the chms are incorrectly part of the RH project.) HTH. Message was edited by: Amebr Including information about underscores in filenames ... View more

For some reason I didn't see your post containing the network guy's explanation. So I was basically saying the same thing, just that I've never bothered to confirm if the reason was technical or procedural. This may not have any bearing as it isn't related to FTP, but I think it is related to virtual drives... We have a directory on the network that we generate to and for some reason it decided that if anyone was viewing any file in that location, it wasn't possible to update the project. At that point we tried generating to a separate directory, then publishing to the original location, on the assumption that maybe that would allow the files to be updated correctly. This wasn't the case unfortunately. We now use a work-around where we generate to one location, email the techs to kick off anyone looking at that location (or sub folders) then manually copy the project across. 1. Generate to "staging area". 2. Techs view use some tool to view all users in that folder and subfolders, and forcibly disconnect them. I believe this is a standard Windows tool, but am not sure of the details. 3. Copy and paste the "staging area" to the "live area". I've been told that this is a "feature" of the technology used and cannot be changed. I think it's a whole bunch of disks that "pretend" to be a set of mapped drives. No explanation was offered for why it worked in that configuration for awhile, then broke, and I eventually gave up trying to find out. We were confused for a long time because sometimes it would work and sometimes not. We came to the conclusion that sometimes people weren't viewing it when we did the release and sometimes they were and obviously we (the writers) don't have any visibility on that and the error message just said it couldn't be generated, not that someone was viewing a file. It couldn't hurt to check with your tech to see if this is a possibility, given that no other suggestions have worked (although booting your users off the webserver isn't ideal). ... View more

Hi Leon, It might not be a "true" network drive, but rather a production webserver. In our company we can't map to these - possibly for security reasons rather than technical reasons, I'm not sure. It might be a similar situation in this case. Amebr ... View more

Thanks for confirming the twisties functionality, Rick. ... View more

Could the dialog box have fallen off the screen somehow? e.g. dual screen setup. If it has, the following should help you grab it: Press Alt, Space, M. Press any arrow key. Waggle the mouse madly until the dialog box appears. Click to drop it where you want. ... View more

Are 'twisties' built into RH8 now? I seem to remember reading it was, but haven't had time to look at it. ... View more

I think "NoNavPane" is the name of a window definition. That is, it's the window that the help topic will open in. I can't help with the rest of the question unfortunately. ... View more

Peter doesn't mention what his usual tricks are, but one that was fairly important in the dim, dark past was copy and paste everything in the document except the final paragraph mark (¶) and paste that into a new document. For some reason a lot of important information was traditionally stored in (after?) the last paragraph mark and leaving that out of the copy/paste process often solved a lot of very odd issues. (I'm not sure if that is still the case in the last couple of versions of Word, but it wouldn't hurt to try either.) I assume Peter tried this already, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to mention it as it does often solve a lot of problems. ... View more

Hi Bob, I should have been more clear. When I generate to webhelp with the 'convert to html' setting ticked, the start of the file is the doctype declaration I posted above. The '<?xml' tag was not included. Amebr ... View more

There are a bunch of posts in the forums about this message although a lot seem to deal with earlier RH versions and some of the suggestions might no longer apply. As the problem seems to affect all your projects the following suggestions might be the most appropriate to try: * uninstall and reinstall RH. Make sure you've completely uninstalled the product. If you have any of the v7 patches installed, I believe you need to uninstall them one by one. Go into Add/Remove Programs, select RH and uninstall. Once that finishes, press F5 to refresh the view. Repeat until RH is completely gone from the list. If you are on 7.03, you might need to repeat 3 or 4 times. * ensure your projects aren't on a network (sometimes "My Documents" is networked. If you can log into any computer and your files in this folder follow you, then it is a network folder.) * ensure RH is installed using your login, after checking with your tech support that your login has admin rights (I don't think this one is relevent for RH7, but hopefully Rick or Peter can confirm) * shorten the path of your projects (e.g. C:\MyProjects\Project1\project1.xpj) If only one or two projects were affected, which it doesn't sound like, the following might be worth trying: * ensure the cpd file is not in source control * Delete the pss file - we've had some odd messages that seem to have been fixed by deleting this file, even though the message didn't seem to relate to it at all. I can't remember the exact issue fixed * close RH and make sure there is NOT an .ldb file present. If there is delete it, as it should only exist while RH projects are open. Sometimes a crash leaves it floating around. Hope something in there helps Amebr ... View more

I did a quick test, and generating webhelp with the setting ticked, my topics get the following doc type: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> Just to clarify, the setting only applies to the output files (i.e. the conversion takes place as part of the Generation process), not the source files that you edit in RH. So if you output to Webhelp, you won't need to to the decompile step in HTML Help Workshop - all your topics will be in HTML. ... View more

You can change the visited and hover colours in your CSS file. If you want different colours for visited and hover, etc, you can define them like so, just changing the colour for each state. a.dropspot:link {...} a.dropspot:visited {...} a.dropspot:active {...} If you want all of them to be the same colour, you can define them like so: a.dropspot, a.dropspot:hover, a.dropspot:visited {...} We've done this with a custom style and it works fine for the links on that type of paragraph. We even defined how the cursor should look. ... View more

Hmm, seeing A4 quoted in inches is very odd. 🙂 The Ruler indeed relates just to the paragraph in focus and sets inline styling for the margin when you drag the sliders for a paragraph. However, they also reflect indenting defined in the stylesheet. So perhaps there is a width defined for the HTML or BODY tags in your stylesheet. You can get the slider to go off the side of the page if the Zoom % is more than 100%, but that's the only thing in RH I can think of that affects it. ... View more

Assuming your developers add an icon or button to individual screens, they should be able to code it to work just like a Help button, which Microsoft uses in dialog boxes. Alternatively there is the little question mark in the title bar, although I'm not sure if that can be coded per screen, or if it has to be turned on for the application as a whole. ... View more

You can't assign multiple topics to the one map id, as how would the app know which topic to display? It might be possible, depending on the application, that developers could write custom code that displays a pop-up so users could choose which topic to display, but that is not how the default MS context help is designed, and RH has been designed to work with the MS method. Additionally, the user might not initially know which is the correct topic to select. What we do is have a single overview topic that contains links and brief descriptions of the other applicable topics. We link the map id to this topic and then the user can choose the appropriate topic, hopefully after reading about the available options. Additionally, for dialog boxes with multiple tabs, the developers can assign a different map id to each tab, so that each tab can have its own topic. HTH, Amebr ... View more

Ah, we're probably 90% on the same page, then. With a slight variation of opinion on multi-level lists. P.S. for anyone following, in the code sample above, the big gap after the FONT tag should have about 8 or 10 nbsp entities listed - couldn't figure out how to fix it and now can't edit it. ... View more

I completely agree that the easiest way to style a list is through the OL/UL tags. However, everything I've written is designed to work with RH WYSIWYG, which as far as I can see doesn't allow you to select OL/UL styles (e.g. OL.MyFirstNumber), only LI. We don't have the time or inclination to manually code in HTML. I did indicate in 3c that assuming your font and size are the same, that information could be defined in the OL, UL definitions, and this also applies to any spacing that may be common, but for us cannot apply to the list-style-type due to our need for a number of different numbering and bullet styles. Additionally, we have to work around legacy issues in Robohelp. Our projects have come through from RH9 (i.e Blue Sky RH9 not the not yet to exist Adobe RH9) and have a lot of legacy / bad html in them. As we don't have the resources to change over 15 large projects in one go, we are going with the Combination method I described. This will allow the legacy code to work and allow us to apply a style once, rather than multiple times (as required in method 2), while eventually ending up with cleaner code and removing the incorrect P tags out of the list items. I've discounted the multi-level numbering for a number of reasons. 1. I have difficulty working out how to get all the levels working together and the help doesn't help. I admit I've given up as the HTML lists are much simpler to set up. 2. If we do have to manually tweak some HTML, the code isn't standard HTML or CSS. I'm sure I could figure it out, but some of my colleagues aren't so technically minded. (In fact a few have practically fainted at the thought of standard HTML, let alone CSS.) 3. I'm really not impressed by the output generated by multi-level lists. It uses deprecated font tags and lots of spans and non-breaking spaces, and ultimately doesn't use OL, UL or LI tags at all. Here's a sample: <p>a)<span style='font:6.0pt "Times New Roman"'><font size="1" style="font-size:6pt;">     </font></span>item 1</p> The HTML lists I describe at least result in clean HTML and CSS: <ol type="a"> <li class="p-ab_list">item 1</li> (yes, "type" is deprecated also, but much better than tonnes of FONT tags and nbsps, IMO. ) Hope this helps explain the reasons for the methods I described. Hopefully non-breaking spaces will now show in the code sample. Message was edited by: Amebr ... View more