Corrupt Czech characters in Table of Contents

[christina_tr]

Hi everyone.

I am working on a pretty big help project in Czech. This is not something I started from scratch, I took it over from a colleague who left our company recently, so I don't know much about how it was done.

The project is made of 3 components, resulting in 3 CHMs which are then copied in the same folder with another CHM using some sort of algorithm.

Once all these files (4 CHMs in total) are copied in a software's Help folder, they are displayed as a single component when you clic the Help button in the software - meaning you see a complete TOC with chapters from all 3 files).

The problem is, when I compile the individual CHMs, I get the message "HTML help settings has unsupported characters for the chosen language. Do you want to continue?"

If I continue, the file is compiled and when I open it, the TOC looks ok. However, when I copy it with the other files and open it in the software (a CAD type program) some characters are replaced with someting else:

I am using Robo Help 10 and the font in the files is Verdana. I read on another thread that the font might be the problem, but I don't know how to change it in all the files (except perhaps from Internet Options in the chm directly?)

My regional settings are also set to Czech when I compile the file, so there shouldn't be a problem. However, every time I compile, I get that message and corrupt characters are displayed in the software's Help.

Can anyone help with this?

Thanks in advance.

Christina

[Jared Hess · Accepted solution]

I'm using RH 9.

From my experience figuring out character issues like this can sometimes more of an art than a science. That's what it seems like anyway.

Some issues at play can be:

1. Desktop language for non-unicode programs should match the output - From Control Panel, in the Region and Language dialog box, on the Administrative tab, make sure the language for non-unicode programs is set to the target language.
2. RoboHelp language settings - Under File | Project Settings, ensure you've set the Language in RH to Czech for all the projects. In addition, in the Single Source Layouts pod, right-click on the output and choose Properties and in the Language drop down, make sure it's set to Czech.
3. Character encoding in the file itself - Open the file (in this case .hhc) inside of a text editor like Notepad++ and from the Encoding menu, check its character encoding. From experience, this should be set to Encode in UTF-8 or Encode in UTF-8 without BOM.
4. Character encoding in the XML tag - Also in Notepad++, check the encoding in the first <?xml ...> tag in line 1. From my hhc file we translated into Czech, it's set to <xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

[christina_tr]

Thanks a lot Jared!

Apparently, the master file with links was the problem, it was the only one which did not have the language set to CZ (point 2 in your solution).

Now it is solved

[Jared Hess]

Great! Glad I could help.