Paragraphs have unwanted borders around them

[BainK]

I suddenly have just a few topics with borders around each individual paragraph in the topic. I have physically removed each one, and set Borders to None, and it looks fine in the topic, but when I do a Preview, they appear. They also appear when I publish. How do I remove these? I am using RoboHelp 9. Thank you.

[RoboColum_n_]

Can you give us some more detail to go on? Are these topics generared from a linked Word / FrameMaker file? Do they all use the same style sheet? Do the affected paragraphs all use the same style? Does the style use a border? What output are you generating?

Try answering these for starters and we'll go from there. Also a screen shot may prove useful of what you are getting.

[BainK]

Hi,

Here are some answers.

These topics are not generated from a linked Word or Framemaker file. They looked fine a week ago.

All of my topics use the same style sheet, yet only a handful of topics have these borders around the paragraphs.

Yes, the affected paragraphs all use the same style: Normal. And no, Normal does not have a border.

I am generating WebHelp.

Thanks,

Kathleen

[BainK]

Below is a screen capture of the topic opened in RoboHelp. Here it looks fine.

Below is a screen when I preview it or in its published form. This didn't look like this a couple of weeks ago when I last published it. And I am the only person who works on this project. And the master page looks fine.

[RoboColum_n_]

Do you have any other browsers installed? If you have, have happens if you display the topic in those? You can do this directly from the preview screen via the View With button in the top right hand corner.

If it is Ok in other browsers, can you tell us the browser you are using. If it isn't OK in other browsers, there must be some code in the topic that causing those paragraphs to be rendered that way. One thing that puzzles me is that you say you have removed the border but that it seems to come back. This suggests to me that your topics DO have some unwanted code in them.

If that is the case, try this:

1. Select a paragraph.
2. Click on the true code tab.
3. Check that the applied style starts with <p> and that there is no other tags before the actual paragraph text.

[BainK]

Hi,

I was previewing it with IE 8 when I saw all the borders.

When I previewed with Google Chrome, it all looked fine.

Kathleen

[Peter Grainge]

You haven't answered all Colum's questions.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[BainK]

I discovered that the CSS was set to have borders around anything with the Normal style. When I fixed that, the borders all went away.

I am however, dealing with the aftermanth of somehow, inadvertantly, writing over my source files with output files. I honestly don't know how that happened. None of my Master pages are showing in the topic properties, so I have to fix all of that. I don't know how I ended up with more than one CSS, and how that one suddenly had the Normal style with borders. But, it's a huge (3600 topics) Help system that is almost 9 years old, so I guess anything can happen. I think my next step is to break this into separate Help projects. Much easier to deal with.

[RoboColum_n_]

If the CSS had borders around the Normal style then someone must have set it that way. It doesn't just happen. Maybe the addition of the CSS is related to your issue with the output files in your source. It is hard to say, but if they were it would still have required a CSS file change by someone. Anyway at least you are making progress.