WebHelp project on virtual machine viewed using firefox contains only title and ""

[chrissy_tissy]

Hi There,
I have a large help file in the WebHelp format that has a custom skin (just different colours and buttons, nothing fancy). When I look at it locally via either IE or FF it looks great, but when I put it on a server (virtual machine w/ windows) I can see it in IE as per, but when I look at it in FF I can only see the title of the project across the title bar and the content "" on a white page in the main part of the window... has anyone else seen this? / any ideas about cures?
Thanks,
Chrissy

[Peter Grainge]

I encountered this and the problem was resolved by the company hosting the webserver. I have the details and will post them over the weekend.

[chrissy_tissy]

Thank you Peter, that will be brilliant!

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

This is what I was advised by the company hosting my site. Show it to your IT guys. I had exactly the same problem.

"I would therefore conclude that the solution to this problem (on Linux systems running Apache) is to add the AddDefaultCharset utf-8 directive to either the Apache config or the site .htaccess file. The advantage of the latter is that it only affects individual sites. The default Apache character set is taken from the locale file on Linux and defaults to iso-8859-1. It is the conflict between the Apache header with iso-8859-1 and the page character set of utf-8 that obviously causes Firefox a problem."

[chrissy_tissy]

Hi,
My machine is Windows, but this fix still worked - some notes about making the fix visible:
1. Do the fix itself (httpd.conf: AddDefaultCharset utf-8).
2. Restart the box to apply the fix.
3. Once the box is restarted, clear your cache in FireFox to make sure you don't continue to see the cached file.
Once all this is done you will see the output content as expected.
Thanks very much Peter!
Chrissy

[Peter Grainge]

Glad it worked and thanks for the additional information.