Is it OK for Spanish characters not to be entities in RH8 webhelp output?

[tspaul]

We are using RoboHelp 8. We have some Spanish words in our English-language help; these Spanish words use some of the accented characters that aren't present in English. My coworker tried using HTML entity codes to enter these characters in the code view, but she noticed that RoboHelp changed these to the actual Spanish character as soon as she switched back to Design view, and this is how they are in the generated webhelp HTML files as well.

I think this is not a problem. The UTF8 declaration appears in the webhelp output, and the characters seem to appear correctly in the browsers I've tested. Am I correct? Should the output work in older browsers as well?

Thanks,

Tammy

[Peter Grainge]

RoboHelp supports 35 languages so the fact that the Design Editor supports those entities does not surprise me.

The following is from the RoboHelp Tour that can be accessed from my site.

RoboHelp 7 introduced the ability to work with 35 languages. In RoboHelp 8, you can now define a language for the project, a language for a topic and a language for a paragraph.

The search works with all the supported languages you use in the project.

There is a lot more information in the help topic "Authoring content in multiple languages".

It sounds like you are just including the odd word so the above may not be relevant, I just wanted to make sure you are aware of this.

I can't help you on how older browsers will handle this but my thinking is they should, they are just HTML entities after all.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[tspaul]

I think I may not have been clear. Though entities (the #& codes) were entered in the code view, once we switched back to the Design view, they were replaced with the actual characters, such as ñ, and that is how they appear in the webhelp output (the HTML files as viewed in a text editor like Notepad). I think this is working because of the UTF8 encoding/support and that it doesn't matter that the more cumbersome entity code (&#241) was not preserved because the browser will recognize and display the character. If that is the case, RoboHelp is just simplifying the code, removing entity codes that are not needed. Is that correct?

[Peter Grainge]

I thought you were saying the HTML had the entity and the Design View had the Spanish character. You are saying that RoboHelp is converting the entity so that you see the Spanish character in both Design View and HTML view, correct?

Your concern is that because the code has the Spanish character rather than the entity, correct? If so, all I can say is that I haven't seen anyone report issues as a result of this.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[tspaul]

Yes, RoboHelp converts the &# entity code into the actual character in both views (and that is what you see if you view the file in Notepad). I don't believe this is a problem - it appears to be supported just fine in the browsers I've checked to far, but I wanted to make sure. It sounds like you are saying you haven't heard of any problems, and I don't see any notes about others having problems, so I'm going to assume this is OK.