Navigation pane doesn't function in Firefox

[M_Boyd]

I'm using RoboHelp HTML version 8 to publish WebHelp. In addition to shipping help with the product, we also make the latest help available on a customer web site. I've got Firefox 3.6 on my machine, and when I open our help in Firefox, the navigation pane is not functional. When I open the help system from the web site, the Contents and Index tabs are completely empty. When I open it from my hard drive or from a server here at the office, a few of our books appear in the Contents, but no topics are listed when you open them.

I searched for similar posts to try to find an answer, but couldn't find anything that explained the problem:

- We're not running any scripts.

- I don't have the Firebug plug-in installed.

- I turned off the popup blocker in Firefox.

- We publish merged help, so I opened each project to verify that they all have the same language selected. They do.

Any help is appreciated!

-Melanie

[MergeThis]

ALL of the output files must be replicated wherever the help is to be published and viewed. That means all those pesky wh*.htm files and those three wh*data folders, too.

Good luck,

Leon

[M_Boyd]

All of the output files are there. We always copy everything -- I wouldn't pretend to know what is and isn't needed! 🙂

[M_Boyd]

Just a quick update to include some information that I learned from my co-workers:

• The help works fine when viewed in Chrome. (Also in IE, as I said earlier.)
  
• If you wait long enough (5 minutes or more), the index and TOC show up in Firefox when viewed from the community website. (I hadn't realized this. I never waited that long!)
  
• When viewed locally, the TOC never shows more than a handful of books -- and no topics-- no matter how long you wait. They're always the same books. (The local files are more recent than those published to the community website, and apparently we've added something that Firefox reallly doesn't like.)

I think this is a problem with Firefox rather than RoboHelp, and fortunately it's not a "must fix" for us. I was just hoping that if I put it out on the community, someone might have seen the same thing and figured out a work-around.

BTW, we are loving RH8!!

Thanks!

Melanie

[Peter Grainge]

This link is to a RH output. Try that in Firefox.

http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh_tour/index.htm

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[M_Boyd]

Works fine! Is that a merged project?

We obviously have something in our projects that doesn't play well with Firefox, but I have no idea what it is.

We're not using skins.

I said earlier that we had no custom scripts, but that's not exactly true. Peter, we're using the redirect script from your website. When we set up our merged help, there was still an issue with links between projects, so we used the structure documented on www.grainge.org. (Many, many thanks, by they way.) But I don't think that script is the problem because the redirect works fine (the content of the main page shows up exactly as expected).

I'm open to suggestions.

[Peter Grainge]

The redirect is not a javascript, it's a plain html redirect.

The link I gave you is not a merge.

Try downloading my merged project demo and putting an output from that on your server.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[M_Boyd]

I did that, and it is fine in Firefox. I also published the demo using exactly the same settings that we use, and that was also fine.

So it's not the fact that projects are merged, and it's not our WebHelp publishing settings. Good to know!

There must be something within our files, but I can't think what. I'll experiment, and if I find an answer I'll update the post.

[Peter Grainge]

Late night thought, well it's late here. Have you generated all the projects in the merge?

There was a report a long time back about merged help being very slow and it was because it was a first time of generating and not all the projects had been generated. Once they had it all worked and you could remove some of them and it was still OK. So generate projects 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, then remove 4 and it was OK. Generate just 1, 2, 3 and 5 was not the same.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[M_Boyd]

I found the problem! The solution is documented here:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/robohelp/articles/merged_help_04.html

We had set up our merged help project a very long time ago, and originally the redirect had a 0 second delay, which no longer works in Firefox. I'm sure this issue has been around for awhile, but our help is for an IE-only web-based product. So until we started making the help available on the community website, support for other browsers wasn't even an issue.

I removed the redirect and put in the script mentioned in the article. Works like a charm!

[Peter Grainge]

Did you see who wrote that article? Sorry I overlooked having to make that change.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[M_Boyd]

Hey, no problem! Thanks for putting it altogether!!