Text is white in some topics in Firefox

[KJoyMcK]

I'm not sure if this is related to the fact that my output is WebHelp  or not, so I apologize if this is a larger problem that should be posted elsewhere.

In  some topics, seemingly randomly, text in some paragraphs displays as  white when viewed in Firefox. I've tried Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, and it  still happpens. The text is black when you edit it in Robohelp, but  outputs as white. As far as I can tell, there's nothing to indicate that the text should ever be white. It's very random; there's no pattern as to type of content or certain topics.

Has anyone seen this before?

[Peter Grainge]

What version and edition of RH would this be? Please see Before You Post?

In RH8 it could be you are using a different CSS when you generate but that would affect IE too. You don't say if you tested in IE.

When you say "random" is it always the same topics, just different paragraphs.

Have you checked the HTML?

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[KJoyMcK]

Robohelp 8, Yes, it's tested in IE and works fine. The issue only appears in Firefox. I've tested IE and Opera. Random means random - there's no pattern to the topics or paragraphs at all.

I've checked the HTML and I don't see anything that would cause it, but I'm going to try to dig a little deeper. All outputs use the same CSS.

[Peter Grainge]

So the white text can be in one topic and next time in another or it could be one paragraph this time and that paragraph next time will be OK.

Have you tried viewing the same output from more than one machine? Try opening it on your machine and then open it from another machine whilst it is still open one the first machine. See if the results are consistent there.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[perttime]

We had something similar, a while ago...

The Writers had been marking unfinished texts as red. Then they made it black after finishing, but Robohelp tagged those spots as "transparent". The texts viewed OK on IE, but Firefox seems to take the "transparent" literally

On one occasion, I removed that tagging manually from raw HTML, to get the files translated in time.... Then I suggested the writers reaply the paragraph styles to get neat HTML.

[KJoyMcK]

That would make sense, I've been using red text in various places to make sure that I remember to update certain portions of the manual. Did you remove all the code surrounding the text and redo, or is there particular code that denotes transparency?

[perttime · Accepted solution]

The color definition may be there as a part of some other markup

For example a paragraph:

<p style="color: transparent"> "#¤%"¤#&/ </p>

If only a part of a paragraph was done in a different color, it is probably there as a "span".

I still found a "space" character, marked as colored...:

<span style="color: #ff0000;"> </span>

--------------------------

EDIT:

in the first case, you'd need to remove this part :  style="color: transparent"

so, <p style="color: transparent"> becomes just <p>

In the "span case" you need to remove both

<span style="color: transparent">  and  </span>

Of, course, a "span" tag may have other content too. Then you are back to removing  style="color: transparent"

or if there are more style definitions in the same tag, just "color: transparent"

Depending on the material, reaplying the paragraph styles may be less painful.

[KJoyMcK]

Thanks Perttime! It all immediately stood out once I knew what I was looking for. It was indeed text that was previously red being marked transparant. That's a pretty silly quirk, hopefully it can be fixed in a future release.

[Captiv8r]

Please take a moment to report this issue to Adobe. Otherwise they may not realize it is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Link to the Bug Reporting form is in my sig line.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7 or 8 within the day - $24.95! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[jenfrg]

I just ran into this issue today, and we discovered that if text was changed to a color to stand out for review (magenta in our case), and then later changed it back using the Automatic option rather than selecting the color Black, it inserted the "color: Transparent;" tag in the code. For some reason, IE doesn't show this text as transparent, but Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome all do.

While this does appear to be a bug of some sort, our workaround is to always select the Black color for the font when changing it back, rather than using the Automatic font option.

[perttime]

Selecting black works.

It has one drawback that might or might not matter:

In many cases, it still leaves color definitions in the HTML.

<p style="color: #000000;"> </p>

In my case it is irritating enough because I need to work on the files outside RoboHelp. The less clutter I have in the raw HTML, the better. I am managing localised helps in over 30 languages and Robohelp does not support nearly all of them, except for generating and even there I need some workarounds.