Robohelp, Firefox and 

[Quiet_in_the_Corner]

Hi all,

I'm reaching my wits end on this one.

A couple of months ago I wrote in with a query regarding encoding issues when serving RoboHelp Webhelp pages from a Linux Apache server to Firefox. Peter Grainge very kindly supplied with a work around that my customer assured me worked (I had no way of testing because I didn't have a build of their product here in the UK at the time, I do now).

Having completed the whole help file I now find that the work around did not work and the pages still serve showing nothing but .

During my own investigation have found that if I edit the spaces out of the top of the root level HTM files the pages do in fact display but with major formatting issues sprinkled at random throughout the whole project, which is not terribly satisfactory.

From what I can tell this is something to do with encoding. Apparently RoboHelp adds it's own 'BOM' (?) but Linux Apache Server modifies the content and Firefox doesn't know how to display the content? I have to admit much of this is over my head, but am right in thinking that if I can find away to prevent RoboHelp from adding the BOM this won't be an issue?

Alex

[Quiet_in_the_Corner]

Hi All,

I've found the solution to this problem yesterday. In a nutshell the issue relates to the fact that RoboHelp outputs HTML with UTF-8 encoding, while the Linux web server I was uploading the Help to was onlu compatible with UTF-16. I fixed this by entering the following header informationa the top of every page of code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16" ?>

I suppose the other fix would be to have the web server configure to support UTF-8, but from a quick, short-term fix point of view, inserting the above header information worked really well.

Alex

[Guest]

Hello Support Group:

Quiet in the Corner's solution did not work for me.

Any other suggestions?

I have the exact same issue.

[Quiet_in_the_Corner]

Hi there,

Since my last post (it's been a while!) I have discovered that if the text you are using has been imported from Word you may find that you need to replace all apostrophes and hyphens in the WYSIWIG (for some reason RoboHelp's interpretation of  these characters is different to Word's) Sounds crazy I know, but it does work (or it did for me). Also, make sure your page names do not have any special characters in them.

Alex

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

These characters are the UFT Byte Order Mark. The following URL may be helpfull: http://www.mind-pioneer.com/services/220_Advanced_search_and_replace.html

Greet,

Willam

[Guest]

One of my users is seeing these characters the first time she tries to open help - if she refreshes, it loads fine. It also works fine on subsequent attempts.

Is this the same as the original poster's problem?

thanks.

-- Jeff

[Guest]

Hi Jeff,

Unfortunately that is not the same issue that I was experiencing.

D-

[Peter Grainge]

Jeff

The original issue is one that would not go away unless the server was reconfigured, a user Refresh would make no difference.

As it is only one person I would look at the version of Firefox and trying things like clearing the cache.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge