RH8 'This topic was created from a Master Page and the header or footer has been modified'

Report · Sep 23, 2009

Hi

When I edit topics that have a Master Page applied to them, RH8 will sometimes say: Headers and Footers - This topic was created from a Master Page and the header or footer has been modified. What's confusing me is that this message can come up when all I've done is add some text half way down the page, no where near the header or footer.

At first I thought it was happening because my colleague added some text to the body area of the Master Page, but even with body area left blank the message still sometimes pops up.

Any suggestions? Am I missing something obvious or fundamental?

Report · Sep 24, 2009

Okay, I've done something to make matters worse. On the Master Page I've removed everything from the body area, so that it only contains header and footer content. Now every single topic I edit tells me I've modified the header and footer. I'm utterly baffled, because even the View toolbar says I'm only editing the body of the topics and I can see no obvious changes when I work.

Report · Sep 25, 2009

Okay, I've cracked it. We update and re-publish our manual almost every day, so I added "Updated:" and an auto-updating date field to the header of the Master Page. This was the cause of my problem. Every time I edited a topic, the date in the header would automatically update, making RoboHelp think the Master Page had changed. The reason it confused me was because whenever I told it to only apply the changes to the current topic it would remove the banner image. I still don't know why it did that, but replacing the auto-updated field with a user variable (that I manually update) seems to have resolved the problem.

Matt

Report · Sep 29, 2009

I've been having the same problem, except that I don't use an autodate or anything like that in my footer or header. And, I believe the reason your banner disappeared is that RH disassociated your topic from the master page when you chose not to apply the change to all topics. I used to experience this problem in RH 7 quite a bit, but, for a reason unknown to me, it hasn't happened in a while. While trying out a trial version of RH 8, though, it's been happening a lot.

Report · Oct 05, 2009

I've only ever used RoboHelp 8, but now you mention it, my colleague used 5X and 7 without incident. Perhaps there's something about RH8 that makes it more temporamental?

I have noticed the following:

If you edit a Master Page while topics are open, RH8 says the topic is different and you get the change prompt.
Editing topics in HTML causes the prompt to occur a lot more often.

The first point does make sense, so it can be avoided by closing down all topics before editing a Master Page. The reason for second point is a mystery to me.

I will say this, I think this prompt needs a 3rd option to re-apply the Master Page to the current topic. That would save a lot of hassle.

Report · Oct 05, 2009

I once accepted the changes and then diffed against the original that I had in source

control. It turns out that RH had inserted an empty <p> element at the top of the <body>

element (or something like that; I don't remember for sure, but the effect was an empty

line at the top of the page). And this happens without me going into the HTML editor.

Adobe Community

RH8 'This topic was created from a Master Page and the header or footer has been modified'