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Garbage characters appearing in CHM Index pane

Explorer ,
Oct 22, 2007 Oct 22, 2007

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Help! I have a CHM that has garbage characters appearing in the Index pane. It is only when accessing the 'p' section of the index. Here is a link to the screenshot so you can see what I mean:

Garbage characters in Index pane of CHM screenshot

I don't know why this is suddenly appearing.

I am using RoboHelp 6 on Windows XP Pro.

Any suggestions on how I can fix this? Do I need to recompile the index? If so, how do I do that?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Greg Davis
Senior Technical Writer
Consona ERP

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Contributor ,
Oct 22, 2007 Oct 22, 2007

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I haven't seen this behaviour yet, so let me ask a few questions:

Do the index links work in these cases?

What does the topic titles look like in these files?

What do the properties of these entries look like?

Is this one help system or do you merge?

Is there any translation involved at any point?

Open the project's HHK-file with Notepad and look at the first lines. Is there any codepage statement?

Answering these questions should help us pin down the problem.

Regards.

---Dirk Bock

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Explorer ,
Oct 23, 2007 Oct 23, 2007

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Dirk,
Thanks for taking the time to help me. Here are the answers to your questions.

Q: Do the index links work in these cases?
A: Yes the links work fine.

Q: What does the topic titles look like in these files?
A: The titles look normal. Is there something I should be looking for?

Q: What do the properties of these entries look like?
A: What specific properties do you mean?

Q: Is this one help system or do you merge?
A: This is one single help file, no merged projects.

Q: Is there any translation involved at any point?
A: No

Q: Open the project's HHK-file with Notepad and look at the first lines. Is there any codepage statement?
A: No. Here are the first few lines:
<html>
<!-- Sitemap 1.0 -->
<object type="text/site properties">
<param name="SiteType" value="index">
</object>

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Greg

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Contributor ,
Oct 23, 2007 Oct 23, 2007

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Greg,
everything looks quite ordinary so far.

Q: What do the properties of these entries look like?
A: What specific properties do you mean?

The index keyword entry is written in the Index Keyword Properties dialog box. Does it look ok in there?

Oh, one more thing: open the HHK with again Notepad and search for the filename, one of those offending index keywords point at. You should see something like:

<li><object type="text/sitemap">
<param name="Name" value="Keyword">
<param name="Name" value="Keyword...">
<param name="Local" value="Topics\Filename.htm">

Doies the Keyword here also show curious characters? If so, you can try to correct these entries directly in the HHK-file. This might help you until we find out what the real problem is.

---Dirk Bock

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Explorer ,
Oct 23, 2007 Oct 23, 2007

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Dirk,
Thanks for the reply.

I checked those index keywords that don't look right in the CHM against the properties in Index Designer and they look normal.

Plus it also looks normal in the .HHK file.

I don't understand why it is just those entries. Would it be easier to rebuild the index?

Greg

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LEGEND ,
Oct 23, 2007 Oct 23, 2007

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Just a hunch Greg....are there any special characters in the keywords (e.g. underscores, accented characters, etc.). Also are there any keywords stored in topics rather than the .HHK file.

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Explorer ,
Oct 24, 2007 Oct 24, 2007

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Colum,
Thanks for replying.

I looked in the index designer and had these keywords at the top of the index:
* wildcard
? wildcard
\Windows\Temp
<<OSESSION.CSYSPATH>>

The garbarge characters occur only in the section of the index beginning with the letter 'p'. The topics that show up in the index have a \ in the index keywords in the properties. Could that be causing the problem?

Greg

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LEGEND ,
Oct 24, 2007 Oct 24, 2007

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Maybe Greg. Test this by creating a new project with a single topic. Add these keywords to the topic and see if the problem occurs. If it does, remove each one in turn and see if it goes away.

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Explorer ,
Oct 24, 2007 Oct 24, 2007

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But the weird thing is that all these keywords have been in the index and the topic properties for a long time. Only after a couple of months has this problem been showing up.

Greg

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LEGEND ,
Oct 24, 2007 Oct 24, 2007

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LATEST
So what has changed since it worked? Upgrade to RH6? New topics? Try to narrow down what has changed and look at things a little more closely.

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