Dual Monitor Bug

[Maureen_G1]

I just wanted to pass this along to anyone who has a dual monitor and Robohelp 7. (I did NOT experience this with Robohelp 5).

I telecommute for most of the week, and fly into the office for the remainder. In the office I have a dual monitor with a laptop docking station, and at home I work on my laptop without an attached monitor.

I learned this the hard way. If you compile Robohelp, or perform any function at all that displays a dialog, Robohelp "remembers" which monitor that dialog displays on, and redisplays it on the same monitor next time, UNLESS you drag the dialog to the other monitor. It doesn't matter if you switch to a "1 Monitor" setting.

Example: You compile your project, and the dialog to Publish displays on your secondary monitor. If you drag that dialog to your primary monitor, the dialog will display on your primary monitor next time you compile. If you leave the dialog where it is, it will display on your secondary monitor next time.

So, at work my dialogs were all displaying on my secondary monitor. I unplugged my laptop and took it home, and each time I compiled I couldn't see the dialog. I got that "ding" you get when a dialog is open, so I couldn't close out of Robohelp, or do anything. When I went to Task Manager, the application was active. The only way I could close out of it was to end the program through the Task Manager.

I learned that Robohelp was stubbornly displaying the dialog on a non-existent second monitor. My settings at home were for "1 Monitor" and it STILL thought I had two, and hung up my application. I could move through the process by pressing Enter, but I didn't know what I was entering because I couldn't see it.

The fix was simple. When I went back into the office, I compiled a project, and the dialog displayed on the secondary monitor. I dragged it to the primary monitor and completed the process to publish. Then I compiled again, and verified that Robohelp dialogs were now defaulting to the primary monitor. I didn't have to do anything else, and it worked fine even when I compiled on my laptop.

[RoboWizard]

Hi Maureen

Until applications like RoboHelp and Windows get a clue when dealing with multiple monitors, you may find the utility linked below to be helpful.

Click here to view

Cheers... Rick

[johnmccallum]

The utility looks interesting but I also recall several years ago someone posting on this forum a Windows key combination to restore off screen windows, which beat changing the registry (my normal MO). Unfortunately, I can't remember it and haven't come up with the right keywords to find it via search. Anyone else remember that?

Perhaps what I'm remembering only worked for the main program window?

John

[Captiv8r]

Hi John

From what I'm reading it would seem you are thinking of the steps I've listed here in the past to restore the Preview window or a missing toolbar. To my knowledge, the utility does nothing to the registry and only lists windows you can't see. But maybe I'm wrong.

Seems I recall someone posting that you could click the Preview icon (which would focus the hidden Preview window) then use the Alt+Spacebar key combination to open the hidden menu on the Preview window and choose M to select "Move". That part never seemed to work for me. Sure, I could waggle the mouse around as was suggested, but it never did produce the window. So I must have been doing something wrong as I think some here reported it worked for them.

Cheers... Rick