Webhelp generated help displays  characters when opened in FireFox 3.0.1

[vchugh]

I use Robohelp & HTML (7.00.145) to generate WebHelp. This help opens correctly in my machine (Windows XP) when I use FireFox 3.0.1, but it does not open in another machine (Windows NT) where the help is integrated with the application. When I open the help form the application it displays  characters. On further investigation, by following the instructions given in http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/browsers/browsers.htm, Issue 3, I was able to solve part of the problem i.e I can now see the Contents, Index and Search buttons on the top. I still cannot see the TOC pane and the Body pane.
Could someone please tell me why this happens and also provide a solution for this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Peter Grainge]

Welcome to the forum.

Before going any further, you should apply the two patches that have been released. Go to Help | Updates.

Also look at Using RH7 on my site.

Not seeing the TOC and Body is not something I have seen reported.

[vchugh]

I tried to apply the patch, but the Help/Updates field is greyed out for me though I have registered my software. I have more information too add as to why  characters are dispalyed. As of now when the help is launched form the application(UNIX server), the default Character Encoding used is Western (ISO-8859-1). You can see this in FireFox by choosing View>Character Encoding. If you change this setting to UTF-8 the help displays correctly. Also in http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh7/using_rh7.htm it is said "Set the 3 bytes UTF-8 BOM (byte-order mark) at the very beginning of the file to tell any kind of text file editor that it is UTF-8 encoded file. These 3 bytes are invisible characters so you won't see them in any editor. These are optional bytes and browsers don’t require them to render a UTF-8 encoded HTML file.". My questions now are:
1. How do you set the 3 bytes UTF-8 BOM if that is the real problem
2. How do I apply the patches
3. Can Robohelp be forced to produce WebHelp with encoding as ISO-8859-1

[Peter Grainge]

1] You don't set them. RH does it.Look at item 22 in the Using RH7.

2] Help | Updates on the RH menu.

3] Don't know.