Gaps in text.

[DebWriter]

Hello!
I'm using Robohelp X5 HTML, but just saw the same problem using the free trial of Robohelp 8 that I recently downloaded.

Occasionally, when I'm making entering text or making changes to existing topics, I see one or more small gaps in my text and I didn't put them there. The gaps are usually at least the size of 7 character spaces.
The gaps do not appear when I am typing the text. Everything looks perfectly normal in that window and the problem is not evident until I preview the topic or generate the chm file again.

I believe this has something to do with bold character formatting because the gaps always show up next to a bold word or paragraph....possibly hidden formatting issue. (I'm not familiar with HTML and don't know what to look for in TrueCode.)

The gaps are not easy to get rid of either. If I remove the bold, it usually does not get rid of the gap. I've tried deleting a portion of the problem area and retyping the text and sometimes the gap moves to a new area. More times than not, I have to delete and retype the entire paragraph.

Thank goodness this doesn't happen often, but when it does it is really annoying. Hope somebody can help!
Deb

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Welcome to our community, Deb!

Here's how to "Un-gap" the text.

Preview the topic and note where the gap is occurring.
Dismiss the preview and locate text on either side of the gap. As you said, it looks perfectly normal in the editor.
Select across the text on either side of the gap.
Change the view from WYSIWYG to HTML. This should show the HTML code causing the issue.
Note that you should see something that looks like this:
<span style="margin-left: 24px;"> (the 24px probably indicates a different value)
Delete the span tag. Everything from the < to the >. <span style="margin-left: 24px;">
Note that this will leave behind an orphaned span tag that looks like this:
</span>
Don't sweat that one. RoboHelp will clean it up for you.
Save the topic and return to WYSIWYG editing view.
Preview the topic and the unsightly gap should now be gone.

Cheers... Rick

[Guest]

Hi Deb,

When I've encountered gaps like this, they were caused by an extra span tag in the HTML in the middle of the paragraph, specifying a certain margin. To see if this is the problem, highlight the gap and some of the text before and after, and then switch to TrueCode. That should take you directly to the place you highlighted. Look for something like this:

<span style="margin-left: 12pt;">

Get rid of that, and then look for the closing </span> and delete that, too, or RH will insert the opening tag somewhere when you switch back to WYSIWYG. Who knows what will happen then.

I'm not sure how this extra margin gets inserted, but the project I saw it in was one I inherited and had originally been created by importing Word documents. But a coworker saw it in her project in a few places, and she created that from scratch in RH7. It may be caused by manually manipulating margins using the ruler instead of applying them using styles, but that's just a guess.

Hope this helps,

Ben

[Guest]

At least, in my experience, RH introduces tags to reconcile orphans. Maybe Rick's experience is different.

[DebWriter]

Well thank you very much, Rick and Ben!
That was the solution to my problem. Now I don't have to waste my time diddling around with that anymore.
Thanks again,
Deb

[Captiv8r]

Hi Deb and Ben

In my experience, Ben is spot on with how these get inserted. I've done some experimenting in the past and have derived a sequence that reproduces it every time.

You start with a throwaway topic. After all, you only want to see how it happens.
As Ben suggested, you manually indent the text using the little widgets on the ruler. So indent a line of text. Just for grins, look at the TrueCode (HTML) for that line of text. You will see that it assigns some styling to add a Margin-left to the P tag. Now return to WYSIWYG and press Enter at the end of the line. You should get a new line that is identically indented. Type a few characters. Then perhaps you are looking at the text and you decide that really the second line is a sentence that belongs in the same paragraph as the line above it. So you position the cursor at the end of the first line and press Delete to remove the paragraph marker and pull the line below to include it with the first.

It's my experience that this action is what causes the span tag to be inserted. Unlike Ben, I've never seen RoboHelp re-create the opening span tag and re-introduce the issue. So maybe we are doing things differently.

Cheers... Rick

[Guest]

Sorry, I didn't mean that this particular issue would be reintroduced from an orphaned closing tag. I just meant that RH would probably insert just <span> somewhere to make up for the </span> that was left behind in the code. An empty span tag doesn't hurt anything, as long as you don't have a style associated with it in your style sheet.

I've seen this with bold tags, too--but again, that was with the same project I mentioned earlier. That one had a LOT of formatting problems and extra, duplicate tags that took me a while to clean up.

[DebWriter]

Well, I really think my problem is due to the bold tags.
I never use the ruler to manually indent text. I always use the indent button from the toolbar.
I always notice the problem when I am bolding words or changing text that includes bolded words.
Of course, there is the possibility that someone before me once used the ruler to indent something in the topic...because I see this problem in projects that I did not originally create.
Now that I know about the span tag, I can try to recreate the scenario next time I see it happen.

[buffbcjoel]

Ok, so it is definitely the bolding - I have the same problem and it drives me crazy.

Even worse when I click View Selected Item to get a look at the topic and the layout, it doesn't show the messed up spacing. Only once it is generated and I'm looking at it will it show the gaps.

In Design:
click Info to display

Becomes in HTML:
click <span style="font-weight: bold;">Info</span> to display

If I take out the span style, then I lose the bolding...if I try to bold again, it comes back. I'd love to be able to bold something like this without having this problem. It only occurs about 10% of the time too. So I have to hunt for them! The rest of my bolding is fine.

Is my only option to get rid of the bolding? It seems like a silly solution, it shouldn't keep coming up like this.

[Peter Grainge]

Buffbcjoel

I just pasted you html into a topic and it looks OK in Design Editor, Preview and WebHelp. Tell us more.

[Captiv8r]

Hi all

Okay, so just today I encountered the issue being discussed WRT bolding and an indent. Oddly enough, it wasn't until I applied bold that I saw the issue.

As I totally suspected, in this case it was a <span> tag wrapped around the bolding attributes. And in my case, it was in conjunction with list text. So not sure if that's a factor or not. At any rate, removing the offending <span> tag corrected my issue.

As it happened my mind wandered back to this post, so I thought I'd post an update.

Cheers... Rick