Red script squares in my topics

[BainK]

I understand that these red squares are related to Javascript code or something. They just appeared in my files. Are they harmless? I have read that they appear if I have copied a published topic into my source files, but I have not done that. How do I make them go away? This is a huge project, so opening each topic and deleted manually is not something I want to do. I am using RoboHelp 9. Thanks.

[Peter Grainge]

Check your layout to see where you last published to. If having published files in your source is the cause, that will highlight it.

Post the heading section of the code and the first few lines of content if the squares are at the beginning of the topics. If not, where are they.

Also confirm you are talking about solid red squares rather than just a small cell with a red border (missing images).

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[BainK]

Hello,

Here is a picture of what it looks like. I am also seeing these before and after tables. Sometime with two solid red squares before and after a table. Also before and inside a footer. I am the only person who publishes this, and it is always to the same location.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Can you also reveal the HTML code behind the topic and copy and paste that here for us to examine?

Cheers... Rick

[RoboColum_n_]

Can you post us some of the code for one of these scripts? Also can you tell us if the script code is the same in each instance?

[RoboColum_n_]

Crikey Rick. You are quick on the draw today. That's the second time in an hour you've beaten me to it. LOL!

[Captiv8r]

Sorry, I'll back off and let you handle all the posts today if you want.

[BainK]

Below is the script at the very beginning of the topic. I could not get all of the topic's script into one screen capture that the forum would accept.

After this code is a huge amount of code, then this is the code just before the first red square.

And at the end, here is the code for the footer where there are two more red squares.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

That last section where you see if (window.writeIntopicBar) is a dead giveaway that this topic is an actual WebHelp OUTPUT topic. That's why you are seeing the red squares.

I often jokingly say the red squares are blood stains from shooting yourself in the foot.

So what you need to do is scrub these topics of all the additional JavaScript code.

See, when you generate WebHelp, each topic is pulled into memory and modified based on the settings in the Single Source Layout recipe. The modified version is then saved to the output location.

RoboHelp simply will not allow you to point the output location to the project location, so this would mean that either the publishing process overwrote the file(s) or they were manually copied to the folder.

Cheers... Rick

[BainK]

To scrub, do I just delete the red squares from inside each topic?

Thanks for identifying this. I don't know how it happened, but it did.

Kathleen

[Captiv8r]

Well, there's the long (but free) way described below:

Click here to view

And there's a script that fellow Community Professional Willam offers that will do the job very quickly.

Click here to view

Cheers... Rick

[BainK · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the answer and the solution. I have over 3,000 topics in this Help system (that's another topic altogether). So it will be a labor of love to remove all that javascript. I don't know how the output files got mixed into the source files, but it appears it did.

[Captiv8r]

Hello again

Then you may well find it worthwhile to purchase Willam's script to tidy things up.

Cheers... Rick

[BainK]

Thanks for your help. Purchasing the solution is not an option. I will be cleaning it up manually. I do not now now the output files got copied over my source files.

Any suggestions on how to avoid that in the future? All I do is back up my source files to a network drive for safe keeping.

In addition to removing the Java script, I have to re-apply the Master pages to all my topics, and go through each topic and clean out where the headers and footers appear in the body of the topic.

Sigh.

[RoboColum_n_]

The only sure fire way to keep the source and output separate is to ensure that the output is generated to a completely different directory. I notice you state in another thread that you are considering splitting the projects up and merging them. If this is the case you may be helped by the fact that the output has to follow a defined folder structure as outlined on Peter Grainge's site: http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/merging_webhelp/merged_help.htm