RoboHelp HTML X5: Merged help not displaying ToC

[sof_tek_com]

Hi All:

Hoping someone can help me here.

I have been generating merged help for some time now w/o problems. But got this problem today after compiling a particular project after a 15-month gap. When I compiled the parent/master project, the ToC displayed the child projects and the Information Bar displayed the following message:

"To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this  file from showing active content that could access your computer. Click  here for options..."

I ignored the message and clicked the child projects to check if they displayed correctly. Each child project opened new instance of IE - this has not happened before. The last time I complied this parent project, everything worked fine and child projects opened within the same browser instance.

Secondly, when I right-clicked the Information Bar message and chose to Allow Blocked Content, the ToC disappeared.

Just in case this is relevant, my employer replaced all our PCs last month and all software had to be reinstalled.

Could this be because of the new version of IE? (My old machine may have had an older version.) Or the fact that I have not installed the updates to Robohelp X5? (I keep getting the message that the Macromedia server is down.) I have not activated the product yet either.

Would appreciate any advice/clues.

Thanks in advance

Sophie

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hi there

Usually you can prevent that message from appearing by enabling Mark Of The Web (MOTW) in the WebHelp generation options. The unfortunate part about that is you stated X5 and X5 didn't offer that option. So the next best thing you can do is to configure IE so it doesn't present the Yellow Information Bar. You do this by opening the Internet Options for IE. Click the Advanced tab and scroll to the Security section. Place a check mark in the option "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer".

Note that this only affects your own computer. If you are planning on having your end users copy the WebHelp files to their local C drives, you will have to instruct them to perform the same steps. But if you are uploading your content to a Web Server, they should not encounter this issue.

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

[Captiv8r]

Oh, one other thing. For the activation of X5, check out fellow Adobe Community Professional Peter Grainge's Snippets page at the link below. You will be interested in Snippet 100.

Click here to view

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

[sof_tek_com]

Thanks for the quick response. I changed the IE setting to allow active content.  That got rid of the Information bar message. Unfortunately, the ToC has disappeared as well :-(.  It displays the dreaded tiny red cross, nothing more. I've never had problems with merged help before as I followed Peter Grainge's innstructions. All that's changed is my machine. Any other ideas?

[Peter Grainge]

I could understand this if the problem was with FF as Mozilla made some changes in Version 3 that caused the TOC not to display using the redirect method I previousl advocated. That was overcome by using a different redirect which is covered in my Merged WebHelp for RH8 article.

The method should work with other versions of RH so you could try that but I am not hopeful as I have not know IE have this problem.

The old downloads for earlier versions are still on my site. See if they work OK.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[sof_tek_com]

You're not going to believe this - the errors were sorted once I selected the DHTML>Pure HTML option.  Since Robohelp was running on my laptop for the first time, I needed to change the default selections.

[sof_tek_com]

Thanks all for all the help!