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Hallo all,
I need to include some mathematical formulae in my RoboHelp 8 CHM file, and have problems with the symbol "is proportional to".
I can get it to display using Symbol font and Alt-0181 (usually the "micro" symbol) but if I open the HTML using Firefox this does not work.
The Unicode abbreviation is ∝ but RoboHelp refuses to accept this, when I insert it in HTML view it converts it to ∝ when I switch back to Design view.
RoboHelp will accept ∝ but IE7 and the CHM viewer fail to display it (Firefox is just fine). The image below summarises the situation.
Note that my SME seems to have incorrectly used "infinity" where he means "proportional"; when he gets back from holiday I'll square that with him. My readers are mathematically literate and will probably see through the mistake and read the formula correctly.
So my options are:
* use Symbol Alt-0181 knowing it will go wrong if we ever go over to WebHelp and Firefox;
* use "infinity" and hope that my readers will forgive me;
* use GIFs and accept the loss of quality
Or does anybody know a way of showing this symbol reliably?
--- Derek
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Hi Derek.
We have a similar requirement where we have lots of mathematical equations and found the easiest methods was to use an image inside the RoboHelp topic. As you say, this is not ideal but it renders successfully each and every time.
The RoboColum(n) | @robocolumn | Colum McAndrew |
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Hi,
I agree with Column. If you're afraid of quality loss with gif, save your images as png. It's a compressed image, without quality loss.
Greet,
Willam
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@Willam: In general I do use PNG, but Word's default export is GIF, and for a black-white image GIF is actually smaller than PNG. AFAIK neither gives quality loss in B-W.
But you can see from the screen grabs that the quality of the Word exports is poor; the subscripts "v" and "n" are hardly readable. I can enlarge the bitmap but then it tends to dominate the screen. I was hoping that some guru could tell me a way to get good quality.
However the fact remains that RoboHelp does not accept "∝" which is, AFAIK, good HTML. Is this a bug? in which case I'll report it. That it isn't displayed properly is (presumably) a Microsoft bug; not much point in reporting that .
--- Derek
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Would it be a lot of work to reimport the images as PNG files into the RoboHelp project after the import to replace the GIFs? You may want to report the symbol issue to Adobe. You can use this link to do so.
The RoboColum(n) | @robocolumn | Colum McAndrew |
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I find it rather ironic, that Willam (who's often called William) should address Colum as Column.
Leon
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Taste my sweet revenge
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I blame the parents
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I reported the bug. I used the example of ∫ (∫) which does not suffer from rendering problems. Thanks for your help anyway.
--- Derek